"After some initial Linux troubles, last month we finally got
Intel Sandy Bridge graphics working under Linux. The latest Intel CPUs
(such as the Core i5 2500K) with integrated graphics are blazingly fast,
and the classic Intel Mesa driver was fast compared to other open-source
Mesa / Gallium3D drivers, but it still was a ways behind the low-end
discrete graphics cards with the proprietary AMD / NVIDIA drivers for
Linux. It was also shown that the Intel Linux Mesa driver is much slower
than the Intel Windows driver for Sandy Bridge, as we had also found was
the case for previous generations of Intel graphics. Committed to the
Mesa mainline Git repository this week though was a very important Sandy
Bridge change. While the commit only touched 13 lines of code (11 lines
of new code, 2 lines of changed code), it has dramatically improved the
Sandy Bridge Linux performance as our results show in this article."
|