Older Broadwell Graphics Performance Is Looking Good With The New Intel Gallium3D OpenGL Linux Driver

First up was the OpenArena game, which isn't all that interesting to modern Linux gamers, but the performance difference was interesting from the Gallium3D driver perspective. With the existing i965 OpenGL driver, the Broadwell laptop had a minimum frame-rate of just 3 FPS while with Gallium3D the minimum frame-rate was 17 FPS. Granted, the peak frame-rate was lower on Gallium3D. The average frame-time was better off with the Gallium3D driver. From Mesa 19.0.8 earlier this year to Mesa 19.3 didn't mean much change for this old open-source game.

For games like SuperTuxKart and Tesseract, the performance was about the same.

The Xonotic first person shooter game was seeing higher performance when switching to the Gallium3D driver.