Intel Kaby Lake HD Graphics 620 OpenGL/Vulkan Performance On Linux

Now having my initial Intel Kaby Lake Core i5-7200U MSI Cubi 2 benchmarks with Ubuntu 16.10 out of the way, this second article is focusing upon the HD Graphics 620 Kaby Lake performance with this latest stable Ubuntu release as well as when trying out Linux 4.9 and Mesa 13.1-dev.

As outlined in that article yesterday, the Kaby Lake support out-of-the-box was good and even the i5-7200U's HD Graphics 620 were running out-of-the-box on Yakkety Yak with Linux 4.8 and Mesa 12.0. In this article are more Steam Linux gaming benchmarks from these latest-generation integrated graphics as well as our first Vulkan tests with Kaby Lake.

The Ubuntu 16.10 stock environment (Linux 4.8 + Mesa 12) was tested followed by Linux 4.9 with Mesa 12 and then Linux 4.9 with Mesa 13.1-dev, in order to see if new Kaby Lake user's can expect any immediate benefits from switching to the newer open-source driver code.

With Mesa 12, OpenGL 4.3 is exposed for Kaby Lake while switching over to Mesa 13 will expose OpenGL 4.5 support.

The Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver was working out fine on both Mesa 12 and Mesa 13.

These straight-forward benchmarks can be found on the pages ahead (or simply by continuing to read this page below, if you are a Phoronix Premium member helping to support the site). Plus with the benchmarking being done in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software you can easily compare your own Linux system's OpenGL/Vulkan results to the data in this article.