SNA Acceleration Works Great For Intel Core i7 Haswell

To complement the Intel Haswell Linux OpenGL benchmarks that we have been publishing on Phoronix for the past week, up today are some Intel Linux 2D performance benchmarks of Haswell with the Intel Core i7 4770K CPU. The 2D performance is comparing Intel's default UXA accelerated code-paths against the experimental SNA acceleration back-end.

Intel SNA, short for "Sandy Bridge New Acceleration", has advanced a lot since its introduction two years ago. While the SNA acceleration code has made a lot of progress and for all generations of hardware it's running extremely fast and well, it's still not the default. SNA continues to be refined by Intel's Chris Wilson and the code-base is very massive, but already it's running well for Intel's latest-generation Haswell graphics.

In this article are Core i7 4770K benchmarks when comparing the SNA and UXA performance with the latest xf86-video-intel 2.21.9 Git code as of 8 June. All benchmarking was handled in a fully automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite software.