Intel's UXA 2D Performance Improvements
Starting with JXRenderMark and its transformed blit bilinear test, using the xf86-video-intel 2.12 driver snapshot clearly led to the best numbers. Upgrading from xf86-video-intel 2.11.0 to 2.11.901 (2.12 RC1) led to a 36% improvement in this area and it is a massive 68% improvement over the stock Intel driver stack found in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.
The transformed texture paint within JXRenderMark was also a win for this new driver. Here there was a 26% gain in the number of operations per second when comparing the 2.11 and 2.12 versions. The latest driver stack was faster by 78% over Ubuntu 10.04.
In not all tests though are the 2D performance improvements massive, but in some areas the new driver is just faster by a couple points.
With the radial gradient paint test via JXRenderMark there is actually a performance drop between the xf86-video-intel 2.11.0 and 2.11.901 versions.