Intel's New OpenGL Driver Is Looking Really Great With The Upcoming Mesa 19.2

When firing off some browser benchmarks that make use of graphics, the Gallium3D and classic Intel Mesa drivers were delivering comparable performance.

Going back to some OpenGL Linux gaming are a few of the Steam games capable of running on Gen9 graphics hardware. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive delivered comparable performance between the two open-source drivers.

Overall, the Intel Gallium3D driver performance is doing quite well. This is easily the best performance showing we have seen out of this driver to date and certainly seems like it could be ready to become the default by year's end. As a reminder, the Gallium3D driver supports Intel Broadwell graphics and newer while older generations will be left to the i965 driver. Mesa 19.2 should be released with this driver around the middle of September. On supported Mesa builds, the Gallium3D driver can be utilized with the MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=iris environment variable.

For Mesa 19.3 as the Q4'2020 driver update, hopefully Intel will soon change the default driver configuration to allow for additional vetting before that release in December, but at this stage the outlook is great for this new OpenGL Linux driver.