Intel Sandy Bridge igp driver underperforms on Linux

Intel’s Linux drivers for the graphics core in the Core i5 Sandy Bridge processors significantly underperform the drivers that Intel has released for Windows. Also, some features are missing from the Linux drivers for Sandy Bridge.

This is evident from a series benchmarks which Phoronix ran on a PC with an Intel Core i5-2500K processor and an Intel H67 Bearup Lake motherboard. As operating systems, Windows 7 x64 Professional SP1 and Ubuntu ran with the 2.6.38-rc4 Linux kernel, while both OSs had the latest driver versions for the igp installed.

The drivers of the HD 3000 Graphics GPU appear to perform significantly worse under Ubuntu than the Intel driver released for Windows 7, according to a series of benchmarks of cross-platform OpenGL games. When running the Lightsmark OpenGL benchmark, the Windows 7 drivers appear to be a factor of four faster than the drivers for the open source OS. Phoronix calls this remarkable, as the proprietary Linux drivers from Nvidia and AMD show nearly identical performance in both OSs.

Not only are the performance of the Linux drivers for Intel’s new Sandy Bridge processor series disappointing, the drivers also have fewer features than the Windows versions. For example, the Windows 7 driver supports OpenGL 3.0, while the Intel Mesa OpenGL driver only supports a limited number of OpenGL 3.0 features. Also, the Linux driver does not have S3TC Texture Compression.