Intel Skylake Performance Boosted By Mesa 11.3

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 22 May 2016 at 09:10 AM EDT. Page 1 of 3. 9 Comments.

This past week I showed how Intel Broadwell graphics are much faster with Mesa 11.3 but this new Mesa version doesn't do much for Haswell. Similar to Broadwell, Mesa 11.3 is a big win if you are on Intel's latest-generation Skylake hardware.

With Broadwell and newer (Skylake included), there's now OpenGL 4.2 on the latest Mesa code rather than OpenGL 3.3. But it's just not about entering the GL4 world why Mesa 11.3 is special, but there are also performance improvements. For your viewing pleasure this weekend I have some HD Graphics 550 Skylake results from an Intel Core i5 6600K system.

For this comparison I tested Ubuntu 16.04 out-of-the-box with Linux 4.4 and Mesa 11.2 followed by upgrading to Mesa 11.3 Git using the Oibaf PPA. For additional reference I also ran benchmarks on Mesa 11.3 when using the Linux 4.6 and drm-next-4.7 kernels too. All of the benchmarks were driven in a fully-automated manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite software.


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