With picking up the Dell XPS 7390 with Intel Core i7-1065G7 for being able to deliver timely benchmarks from Intel's long-awaited 10nm+ Icelake generation, one of the first areas we have been testing is the Iris Plus "Gen 11" graphics performance. In this article are our initial Windows 10 vs. Linux graphics performance numbers for Ice Lake.

For this very first Intel Iris Plus Gen11 graphics testing are results from Windows 10 compared to Ubuntu 19.10. Ubuntu Linux was benchmarked with its stock driver stack comprised of Mesa 19.2.1 as well as opting for the "Iris" Gallium3D driver and also testing Mesa 19.3-devel both with the default i965 OpenGL driver and the Iris Gallium3D driver. Of course, for the Vulkan tests on Linux is their sole "ANV" Vulkan driver.

The Dell XPS 7390 was equipped with the Intel Core i7-1065G7 Ice Lake processor and its Iris Plus Graphics, 2 x 8GB LPDDR4 3733MHz memory, 500GB Toshiba NVMe solid-state drive, and 1920x1200 panel.

• Godot's Vulkan Renderer Is Getting Into Increasingly Good Shape

  Lead developer of the open-source Godot 2D/3D game engine Juan Linietsky has continued working daily on the engine's Vulkan renderer ahead of Godot 4.0.

• GNOME's Mutter 3.35.1 Fixes The Night Light Mode On Wayland

  With many of the prominent fixes that we've talked about for GNOME Shell and Mutter since last month's 3.34 release having been back-ported to 3.34.1, this weekend's release of GNOME Shell 3.35.1 and Mutter 3.35.1 as the first steps towards GNOME 3.36 aren't all that big. But at least in the case of this new Mutter development release are some worthwhile fixes.

  GNOME Shell 3.35.1 has just different bug fixes and clean-ups but nothing particularly special. While no big features yet, at least the useful fixes over recent weeks were back-ported to the 3.34 stable series.

• Vulkan To Better Handle Variable Rate Displays / Adaptive-Sync In The Future

  While longtime X11 developer Keith Packard is now working for SiFive on RISC-V processors by day, he's still involved in the Linux graphics world through his contract work for Valve. At the XDC2019 conference earlier this month he presented on display timing, the current Linux plumbing for it, and also bringing up Vulkan will better support variable rate displays in the future.

  Keith for a while now has done contract work for Valve with Linux graphics infrastructure improvements around better supporting VR HMD hardware on the Linux desktop and more recently on display / refresh rate timing and ensure it works punctually.

• X.Org Server To See New CI-Driven Automated Release Cycles, Big Version Numbers

  There hasn't been a major release of the X.Org Server now in 17 months... Not because there haven't been any changes (in fact, a lot of GLAMOR and XWayland work among other fixing) but because no one has stepped up as release manager to get the next version out the door. But to workaround that, developers are looking at moving the X.Org Server to purely time-based releases and letting their continuous integration testing be the deciding factor on if a release is ready to ship.

  Adam Jackson of Red Hat proposed at last week's XDC2019 the idea of having these new, effectively automated X.Org Server releases. The xorg-server releases would get back on to their six-month release cadence and be largely autonomous with sticking to the release timeframe and just ensuring the testing gets done by way of their CI system to ensure the X.Org Server is in good shape for releasing.

• Tons Of The Intel Tiger Lake "Gen 12" Graphics Compiler Code Just Landed In Mesa 19.3

  A lot of the Tiger Lake "Gen 12" graphics compiler infrastructure changes to Mesa for Intel's open-source OpenGL and Vulkan Linux drivers were just merged into the Mesa 19.3 code-base.

  These compiler changes have been public and under review for several weeks now but have just been merged to Mesa 19.3-devel this Friday afternoon. The changes for Tigerlake/Gen12 represent the biggest changes to Intel's graphics ISA going back to the original i965. As explained last month,
  nearly every instruction field, opcode, and register type is updated and the hardware register scoreboard logic has been punted into software with now leaving it up to the compiler now for ensuring data coherency between register reads/writes and a new sync hardware instruction.

• Raspberry Pi 4's V3D Mesa Driver Nearing OpenGL ES 3.1

  Back during the summer Eric Anholt who had been the lead developer of Broadcom's VC4/V3D graphics driver stack most notably used by Raspberry Pi boards left the company to join Google. In his place, the Raspberry Pi Foundation is working with consulting firm Igalia to continue work on the DRM/KMS kernel driver and Gallium3D drivers for this open-source graphics driver support.

  Igalia has been working recently on V3D shader compiler improvements with implementing more pieces of NIR as well as addressing test case failures / bugs. One of the areas they have been working on a lot is OpenGL transform feedback.

Earlier this week I provided some fresh Windows vs. Linux web browser benchmarks for both Firefox and Chrome. For those curious how the current Windows 10 vs. Linux performance is for other workloads, here is a fresh look across a variety of software applications and while testing the near-final Ubuntu 19.10, Intel's rolling-release Clear Linux, and Debian 10.1 while running off an Intel Core i9 HEDT platform.

Ahead of all our autumn 2019 Linux distribution update benchmarks, this article is a fresh look at the Microsoft Windows 10 Pro x64 performance compared to these popular Linux distributions. Particularly with Debian 10 and Clear Linux, they tend to be the fastest Linux distributions we routinely benchmark at Phoronix while Ubuntu is included due to its popularity.

These four operating systems were all tested on the same Intel Core i9 7980XE + 4 x 4GB DDR4-3200 memory + NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN X + Samsung 970 EVO 500GB NVMe SSD system with the i9-7980XE being the newest Intel HEDT platform I have available for testing at the moment.