Intel Ivy Bridge Linux Performance Stepped Up In 2013

In continuation from last month's Intel Haswell Linux Performance Improved A Lot In 2013, here are benchmarks of Intel "Ivy Bridge" HD Graphics 4000 when comparing the performance over the past year.

Similar to the Haswell testing and the open-source Radeon 2013 tests, the Ivy Bridge year-end benchmarks were done by installing Ubuntu 12.10 and checking the "out of the box" performance at the end of 2012 and then installing a development daily snapshot of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to check in on its performance at the end of 2013. A separate run of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS was also done when upgrading to the Linux 3.13 Git kernel.

A Core i7 3770K "Ivy Bridge" processor was used for all of the testing. The CPU was clocked the same during all of the testing but it's just reported differently on the Linux 3.13 kernel due to a difference with the CPUfreq kernel driver. Ubuntu 12.10 had Mesa 9.0.3, Linux 3.5, and xf86-video-intel 2.20.9 as the key Intel IVB driver versions while Ubuntu 14.04 by default right now in its development stage has Linux 3.12, Mesa 10.0, and xf86-video-intel 2.99.904. This testing followed the same approach as the other year-end Linux driver articles with the Phoronix Test Suite so let's jump straight to the results.