Last month I did some fresh benchmarks of Intel's new open-source OpenGL Linux driver with Mesa 19.2 and those results were looking good as tested with a Core i9 9900K. Since then, more Intel Gallium3D driver improvements have landed for what will become Mesa 19.3 next quarter. In taking another look at their former/current and new OpenGL drivers, here are fresh benchmarks of the latest code using a Core i7 8700K desktop as well as a Core i7 8550U Dell XPS laptop.

This month so far Intel's new Gallium3D OpenGL driver has seen OpenGL 4.6 support added, an optimization to help the Java OpenGL performance (one of the deficiencies noted by our earlier rounds of benchmarks), and other performance work.

For some weekend benchmarking fun I tested the Core i7 8700K desktop and Dell XPS 13 laptop with Core i7 8550U graphics while comparing the OpenGL driver options. The driver state for both the i965 and Iris Gallium3D drivers were of Mesa 19.3-devel Git as of this week and also running with the near-final Linux 5.3 kernel.

• NVIDIA 430.50 Linux Driver Brings Color Fix For Pre-Turing GPUs

  While the NVIDIA 435 series is now stable, for those sticking to the previous NVIDIA 430 driver series that is their current "long-lived" driver branch, a new version is available.

  NVIDIA 430.50 was released on Wednesday as the latest Linux driver release in this driver series supported for an extended period of time. The only listed change for the NVIDIA 430.50 Linux driver is fixing the display color range handling for pre-Turing GPUs. When limiting the color range via the NVIDIA-Settings GUI, the output pixel values will now be properly clamped to the CTA range.

• Mesa 19.2-RC3 Released While Final Release Expected Around Month's End

  The third release candidate of the belated Mesa 19.2 is now available while a fourth and likely final RC is expected next week while the stable release of this quarterly Mesa3D update should be out at month's end.

  Mesa 19.2-RC3 back-ports the new support for DriConf in Intel's Vulkan driver (for a workaround with GfxBench), various NIR fixes, a GLX segmentation fault is fixed, a few RADV and RadeonSI fixes (including Navi/GFX10 fixes for RadeonSI), and the Intel glthread crash fix for KDE's KWin.

• AMDGPU Driver Looking To Re-Enable Performance-Boosting "Bulk Moves" Functionality

  AMD developers are looking at finally re-enabling the LRU bulk moves functionality in their AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver that has the ability to help with performance.

  The LRU bulk moves patches were posted back in August of 2018 with the ability to help improve OpenCL and Vulkan performance for Radeon graphics. But prior to the release of the Linux 5.0 kernel that functionality was disabled for bugs.

The takeaway is clear: same minimum framerates, and an average framerate only 2.6% lower than Windows 10. Effectively within margin of error, and certainly not discernible when we’re talking about 112 FPS versus 115 FPS.

(The eagle-eyed among you may even notice slightly lower frametimes on the Linux side when watching the benchmark video.)

When you step back and realize that Far Cry New Dawn was never intended to run on Linux, yet does so this smoothly, it’s a testament to how far Linux gaming has come.

My own benchmarks – albeit for different titles – back this up. And when games are released natively on Linux, the performance is often better than the Windows 10 counterparts. It’s not a consistent conclusion, but as Codeweavers and Valve continue to refine and improve what they’re doing, the outlook gets brighter and brighter.

• F2FS Will Have Faster Case-Insensitive Lookups With Linux 5.4

  F2FS has done a good job following EXT4 that spearheaded this modern case-insensitive directory/file feature that's optional and opt-in on a per directory basis. Like with F2FS' other following of EXT4 around this feature, it's now ported the look-up optimization from 5.3 to its driver. On the EXT4 side it has resulted in around 30% faster look-ups on large directories by introducing a temporary cache to avoid repeated case-folding.

• How Intel's Clear Linux Team Cut The Kernel Boot Time From 3 Seconds To 300 ms

  Intel engineer Feng Tang spoke at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference in Lisbon, Portugal on how the Clear Linux team managed to boot their kernel faster. They started out with around a three second kernel boot time but cut it down to just 300 ms.

  Among the optimizations carried out to really speed-up their boot time were ensuring more asynchronous driver probing, only initializing a small amount of RAM at start and then after booted hot-plug the rest of it in parallel via systemd, optimized root file-system mounting, disabling unnecessary kernel modules, and similar approaches.

• Intel's Gallium3D Linux Driver Now Exposes OpenGL 4.6

  But unlike the i965 driver with OpenGL 4.6 support back-ported to Mesa 19.2, for the Intel Gallium3D driver it isn't marked for back-porting so is likely a feature for next quarter's Mesa 19.3 with that being the version in development on Git master. The Intel Gallium3D support comes after all the heavy-lifting done for getting the SPIR-V extensions in place for the common Intel graphics code over the past two years. This Intel Gallium3D driver is now the second in Mesa supporting GL 4.6 and the first Gallium3D driver to do so.