Intel has published an early Mesa 3D graphics driver for Linux, improving gaming performance by up to 18%. Containing 14 patches, this update comes at the right time to be implemented in the day one driver suite of upcoming Panther Lake CPUs, which are scheduled for this quarter. This should help deliver a better first impression, which is naturally important.
Intel has indicated these changes focus on compiler scheduling and thread parallelism optimisations, in effect helping the GPU reclaim untapped performance due to bugs. As a reminder, Xe3 integrated graphics are part of the Core Ultra 300 Panther Lake CPUs, set to power next-gen laptops.
According to tests conducted by Francisco Jerez, this patch improves performance by 18.11% in NBA 2K23, 9.43% in Ghostrunner 2, and 8.21% in Space Engineers, just to name a few. The lowest gains were seen in Destiny 2 and God of War, with 1.58% and 1.69%, respectively.
On the other hand, Kevron Rees, saw up to 8.1% in Black Myth: Wukong, with the other titles seeing from 6% to no gains. Rees believes these discrepancies could be attributed to a combination of CPU and GPU bottlenecks that sometimes conceal the effect of a change on GPU performance, or some setup/testing differences. Overall, these new drivers delivered about a 2.4% boost in Rees’s tests, which, while not groundbreaking, remain welcome.
That said, these improvements came at a cost, which hopefully is only temporary. According to Kevron Rees’ tests, this new driver has the side effect of inflating shader compilation times by up to 25%. Though not problematic per se, since games only compile them during the initial launch, if said game is frequently updated, this could quickly become annoying. The same goes for when the graphics driver is updated; games rerun the shader compilation.
With that in mind, if the final benefits turn out closer to Jerez’s findings, I bet many gamers won’t mind a 25% longer loading time for the first game launch. Lastly, titles such as Cyberpunk 2077 and Borderlands 3 have been reported to suffer from periodic hangs, which should be fixed by following updates.
The important takeaway here is that Intel is actively working on optimising its next graphics architecture, with real positive results. By the time Panther Lake is released, most bugs should be ironed out, hopefully without impacting these performance gains.
