Phoronix takes a look at the Intel Haswell HD Graphics 4600 Performance on Ubuntu Linux

After delivering the Intel Core i7 4770K Haswell benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux this week already, which focused mostly on the processor performance, in this article are the first benchmarks of the Haswell OpenGL Linux performance. Testing was of the Intel HD Graphics 4600 graphics core found on the i7-4770K, which under Linux is supported by Intel's open-source driver.

As talked about in my launch-day Intel Haswell article, the Linux support isn't as primed as the Windows support is, especially on the graphics side. The Intel Windows graphics driver for Haswell supports OpenGL 4.0 and also OpenCL, plus good performance. On the Linux side, their current stable driver for Haswell (and Sandy/Ivy Bridge generations) only officially supports OpenGL 3.1. With the latest development code, there is OpenGL 3.2~3.3 support forthcoming, but it won't officially be released until later on in H2'2013. On the OpenCL side, there is Beignet, but that project isn't yet usable for end-users and is still in its infancy. As also said in the launch-day Haswell article on Phoronix, the Intel developers know the Windows driver will be more competitive than the current Linux driver.

For seeing where things stand today, the Intel Core i7 4770K CPU with its HD Graphics 4600 were benchmarked on the latest Linux code (Linux 3.10 + Mesa 9.2-devel + libdrm + xf86-video-intel) atop Ubuntu 13.04 x86_64. With the same software stack, the Intel Core i3 2120, i5 2400S, i5 2500K, i5 3470, and i7 3770K CPUs were benchmarked. These other tested Intel CPUs represent Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge with the HD Graphics 2000, 2500, 3000, and 4000 generations. Additionally, the AMD A10-5800K APU with Radeon HD 7660D graphics was also tested as a reference point from Linux 3.10 + Mesa 9.2-devel.

  Intel Haswell HD Graphics 4600 Performance On Ubuntu Linux