Mesa's New "Crocus" OpenGL Driver Is Performing Well For Old Intel Hardware

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa's New "Crocus" OpenGL Driver Is Performing Well For Old Intel Hardware

Landing this week in Mesa 21.2's development code is Crocus Gallium3D providing a new Intel OpenGL driver for i964 "Gem4" through Haswell "Gen7" graphics. While even Haswell graphics are showing their age these days, I couldn't help but to fire up a few benchmarks seeing how this new Crocus open-source OpenGL driver performs against the existing "i965" classic open-source driver for Linux systems.

https://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=30260

[iskra32]

Does VAAPI work with this driver or does the intel-media-driver interface with i915 directly?

[Aryma]

I went to see how both drivers do against windows driver

[microcode]

Very cool, I like how the frame time spikes are lower, even when average performance is similar.

[murraytony]

Is "Gem4" to "Gen7" a typo?

[FireBurn]

Does VAAPI work with this driver or does the intel-media-driver interface with i915 directly?

It's based on Iris, so the intel-media-driver should technically work

If not you can force it with LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=i965 (or iHD on Haswell+)

[stalkerg]

Haswell is 7.5 generation in Intel terms...

[antonyshen]

The result looks terrific! Crocus really paves the way for Haswell to the future!!

[remenic]

I'm not expecting it but does it offer any benefits to OpenGL based compositors, specifically kwin?

[zerothruster]

Noob question: Do I have to use the intel video driver to use this ? Asking because on my haswell I dropped back to modesetting maybe a year ago so that I can see video output in parole (rather than horizontal lines). TIA