Intel vs. Modesetting X.Org DDX Performance Impact

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 11 January 2017 at 09:14 AM EST. Page 1 of 4. 30 Comments.

With word of Fedora switching away from using the Intel X.Org driver in favor of the generic xf86-video-modesetting driver, following in the steps laid by Debian/Ubuntu, there is fresh discussions over features and any performance impact of xf86-video-modesetting vs. xf86-video-intel DDX drivers. As such, here are some fresh 2D and 3D benchmarks.

For those curious about the current xf86-video-intel vs. xf86-video-modesetting performance differences, from a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon with Core i7 5600U Broadwell CPU (GT2 graphics). Various OpenGL and 2D benchmarks were run via the Phoronix Test Suite.

Atop Ubuntu 16.10, the system was upgraded to Mesa 17.0-devel, xf86-video-intel 2.99.917 Git, xf86-video-modesetting 1.18.4 with X.Org Server 1.18.4, and the Linux 4.10 kernel.

While the default behavior has changed for Ubuntu/Debian and with Fedora 26, you can still load your own modesetting/intel DDX driver preference via the xorg.conf/xorg.conf.d and that's how this testing was facilitated.


Related Articles
AMD Quietly Funded A Drop-In CUDA Implementation Built On ROCm: It's Now Open-Source
Trying Out & Benchmarking The New Experimental Intel Xe Linux Graphics Driver
Intel's Open-Source Compute Runtime Performing Increasingly Well Against NVIDIA's Proprietary Linux Driver
Intel Arc Graphics See Faster Performance On Ubuntu 23.10
Raspberry Pi 5 Graphics Continue With Open-Source Driver & Crazy Fast Compared To RPi 4
Initial Benchmarks Of The "NVK" Open-Source NVIDIA Vulkan Driver