How Intel HD Graphics On Linux Compare To Open-Source AMD/NVIDIA Drivers With Steam On Linux
As earlier this week I did a 20-way AMD Radeon open-source comparison, looked at the most energy efficient Radeon GPUs for Linux gaming, and then yesterday provided a look at the fastest NVIDIA GPUs for open-source gaming with Nouveau, in this article is a culmination of all the open-source graphics tests this week while seeing how Intel Haswell HD Graphics fall into the mix against the open-source Radeon R600/RadeonSI and Nouveau NV50/NVC0 graphics drivers.
With using the same system and nearly the same software stack (just having to bump the Mesa Git a few revisions for addressing a Nouveau compatibility issue), this is a wide look at the open-source graphics performance for Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau on Linux. The Linux 3.17 Git kernel and Mesa Git from this week (around the branching of Mesa 10.3 to Mesa 10.4-devel) along with the updated user-space drivers from the Oibaf PPA on Ubuntu provide a very good look at the best-case driver scenarios using the latest code out-of-the-box.
The Intel Core i7 4790K system with the ASRock Z97 Extreme6 motherboard, 16GB of DDR3 system memory, and 128GB Crucial SSD saw the following graphics cards tested this week from its Ubuntu 14.04 system with Mesa/Linux Git:
1: GeForce 9800GT
2: GeForce GT 520
3: GeForce GT 610
4: GeForce GT 740 SC
5: GeForce GTX 460
6: GeForce GTX 650
7: GeForce GTX 680
8: GeForce GTX 760
9: GeForce GTX 770
10: GeForce GTX 780 Ti
11: GeForce GTX TITAN
12: HD Graphics 4600 (of the Core i7-4790K CPU)
13: Radeon HD 4670
14: Radeon HD 4770
15: Radeon HD 4830
16: Radeon HD 4850
17: Radeon HD 4870
18: Radeon HD 4890
19: Radeon HD 5450
20: Radeon HD 5750
21: Radeon HD 5770
22: Radeon HD 5830
23: Radeon HD 6450
24: Radeon HD 6570
25: Radeon HD 6770
26: Radeon HD 6870
27: Radeon HD 6950
28: Radeon HD 7850
29: Radeon HD 7950
30: Radeon R7 260X
31: Radeon R9 270X
32: Radeon R9 290
Just to reiterate for any Linux newbies, this is only the open-source graphics drivers being tested and not the proprietary AMD Catalyst or NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers. All of the Source Engine Steam game tests were done using the Phoronix Test Suite. For those looking for non-Source-Engine games (there's just been a lot of them this week due to reader requests), see our many other recent Linux display driver articles and Linux graphics card tests.