Submitted by We’ve known that Intel’s P-State Linux CPU frequency scaling driver in general can be a bit quirky and especially so when dealing with Intel integrated graphics where the iGPU and CPU share the same power envelope. This has been shown with examples like using the “powersave” governor to boost iGPU performance while discrete graphics owners are generally best off switching over to the “performance” governor. As the latest though on helping the iGPU front with P-State, there is a new patch series talking up big gains in performance and power efficiency.
Francisco Jerez of Intel’s open-source driver team sent out a set of ten patches today working on GPU-bound efficiency improvements for the Intel P-State driver.
This is a very welcome patchset, since the interplay between Intel processor and Intel integrated GPU isn’t exactly optimal, as we’ve talked about before.
A quick poll…
1) do you use linux?
2) do you use integrated graphics?
For myself, all of my desktop computers support intel integrated graphics, but I have discrete nvidia cards in all of them.
My laptop has a Quadro 3000M, which is quite dated now but still faster than the integrated graphics on i9-9900k
https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=Intel+UHD+630&id=3826
https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=Quadro+3000M
These patches might provide some fairly significant gains, any speedup will be a welcome change for linux IGPU users!
Desktop graphics aren’t that important to me, but I’m hopeful this could help with opencl running on integrated GPU.
I use Linux on all of my hardware and the integrated Intel graphics on one of my laptops out of necessity because I can’t get the discrete Nvidia GTX1060 graphics to work on Xubuntu. I haven’t tried any other distribution yet, but I will do so in the future.
My concern is mostly for older laptops with only those less powerful integrated Intel graphics which are falling behind the curve just because of that. In my experience 2015/2016 era Intel integrated graphics are about as good as 2010/2011 era AMD integrated graphics, which is still rather sad.
psychicist,
Curse nvidia for making it unnecessarily difficult to install, but I’ve always found that once installed, nvidia’s official downloadable drivers are better than the open source and even the bundled drivers. Have you tried it? Personally I’d try this before switching distros.
Laptops have an additional complication due to functionality that allows them to switch between GPUs based on power profiles. It’s possible that this is a factor, but I’m afraid I’m not very familiar with these tools.
http://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/75pfxo/how_do_i_switch_between_my_dedicated_gpu_and/
optirun
primusrun
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hybrid_graphics
https://wiki.debian.org/Bumblebee