Trying Out & Benchmarking The New Experimental Intel Xe Linux Graphics Driver
Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 22 December 2023 at 09:10 AM EST. Page 2 of 4. 11 Comments.
While one of the main hopes with the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver is to deliver better performance, for the moment this still-experimental driver was actually showing lower performance on all three tested Arc Graphics cards.
In some cases the performance regression of using the Xe kernel driver was rather significant compared to the i915 driver.
Again, the i915 kernel driver will continue to be used by default for all currently released Intel kernel graphics hardware, so when moving to Linux 6.8+ you won't risk the slowdown in performance unless you are explicitly opting into this driver that's still under heavy development.
Going into this I was hoping to see some nice performance wins with the Xe kernel driver, but we're not there yet.