Intel’s open-source driver team has managed to improve the performance of its iGPUs by 15% while increasing its performance per watt by 43%.
Intel achieves open-source graphics drivers that improve performance by 15%
Intel had previously promised to focus on open-source drivers for Linux and seems to be providing drivers that improve the performance of its iGPU, especially with Ice Lake chips.
In a single patch, Intel developers were able to improve performance per watt by 43% (which is a very significant gain), while absolute performance increased by 15%. The patch was tested on an Ice Lake iGPU, but should be valid for almost all modern Intel iGPUs.
However, based on the iGPU we used, we experienced a performance improvement on another level, in this case, the improvement was tested with an Ice Lake chip in a Razer Blade Stealth 13 laptop. Therefore, those who play Linux on their laptop with an Intel processor should experience good performance improvement.
Intel is preparing its Tiger Lake graphics for an early release, and this would provide the performance of a PS4. Linux support for TGL will be very important if the company wants to establish a permanent footprint in the market.
Intel’s Tiger Lake U processors will have a DG1 iGPU with 96 EUs each. If the ratio of EUs to SPs (or whatever you want to call them) remains the same, we’ll be dealing with about 768 cores. At a frequency of 1.2 GHz, these cores will be able to generate 1.84 TFLOPs of computation. Interestingly, this is exactly the same level of graphics performance as the original Sony Playstation 4.
Intel is setting the course for a quantum leap in integrated graphics, which AMD has done very well with its Ryzen APUs.