Categories: 3D Software

What you should know about Broadway Gallium3D.

Much of the benchmarking of Intel`s new Gallium3D OpenGL open source driver will be done with various “Gen9” graphics hardware, as this is spreading rapidly and Icelandic Gen11 graphics hardware for Linux benchmarking is not yet available. But since the Iris Gallium3D again supports Broadwell “Gen8” graphics, in this article we take a look at how the oldest supported Intel hardware works for this new Linux open source OpenGL driver, compared to the current standard “i965” Intel OpenGL driver.

The performance of the Gallium3D driver is excellent. It looks like Intel is still on track to enable this driver by default in Mesa before release 19.3 at the end of the calendar year. Web were curious about Broadwell, so we turned on an old Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon laptop.

With the HD graphics 5500, which is found on the ThinkPad X1 Carbon`s Core i7 5600U, we have been benchmarking the Mesa 19.3-devel code`s “i965” (classic/default) OpenGL driver. Additionally, there are also Mesa 19.0.8 benchmarks of the standard Intel OpenGL driver that were just found with Ubuntu 19.04. to give an insight into the development of Intel Mesa performance this year.

Broadway Gallium3D
Intel Core i7-5600U @ 3.20GHz (2 Cores/ 4 Threads)
LENOVO 20BSCTO1WW (N14ET49W 1.27 BIOS)
Intel Broadwell-U-OPI
8192MB
128GB Samsung MZNTE128
Intel HD 5500 3 GB (950MHz)
Intel Broadwell-U Audio
Intel l218-LM + Intel 7265
Ubuntu 19.04
5.0.0-29-generic (x86_64)
GNOME Shell 3.32.2
X Server 1.20.4
Modesetting 1.20.4
4.5 Mesa 19.0.8 4.6 Mesa 19.3.0-devel (git-99cbec0 2019-09-19 disco-olbaf-ppa)
GCC 8.3.0
ext4
1920×1080

The Phoronix Test Suite has been used to perform a number of OpenGL graphics tests and games that can run adequately on Broadwell Gen8 era graphics.

Thank you very much for your visit.

3DMaster