Skylake GL2 performance (or any other intel onboard card)

My current laptop has a build in intel graphics card model HD Graphics 530 (Skylake GT2).

I feel like the gnome desktop is a little slugish and there is a lot of tearing especially on the build in screen,w

Here are some of the test results of the glx utilities:

~> vblank_mode=0 glxspheres
Polygons in scene: 62464 (61 spheres * 1024 polys/spheres)
ATTENTION: default value of option vblank_mode overridden by environment.
ATTENTION: default value of option vblank_mode overridden by environment.
Visual ID of window: 0x96
Context is Direct
OpenGL Renderer: Mesa DRI Intel(R) HD Graphics 530 (Skylake GT2)
295.032898 frames/sec - 329.256715 Mpixels/sec
221.640798 frames/sec - 247.351130 Mpixels/sec

~> vblank_mode=0 glxgears
ATTENTION: default value of option vblank_mode overridden by environment.
ATTENTION: default value of option vblank_mode overridden by environment.
37823 frames in 5.0 seconds = 7564.508 FPS
37781 frames in 5.0 seconds = 7556.067 FPS

I am no expert but I will say this should handle gnome relatively decent, what performance are you getting out of your intel card?

Skylake processors have some problems The 4.4+ kernel is supposed to address them. But AFAIK they do not deal with the graphics

Thanks for the reply, so the benchmarks are lower than you’ll expect?

No they seem pretty good for a CPU bound GPU. On-board GPU are generally inferior to separate GPU They simply do not have the same number of cores so can never be as fast.

This is what I get from an HD4600 GPU (integrated into i7 4720HQ).
I don’t know how it relates to yours, but you can find benchmarks over the net.

bruno@LT_B:~> vblank_mode=0 glxspheres
Polygons in scene: 62464 (61 spheres * 1024 polys/spheres)
ATTENTION: default value of option vblank_mode overridden by environment.
ATTENTION: default value of option vblank_mode overridden by environment.
Visual ID of window: 0xb5
Context is Direct
OpenGL Renderer: Mesa DRI Intel(R) Haswell Mobile 
304.287471 frames/sec - 339.584818 Mpixels/sec
280.901570 frames/sec - 313.486152 Mpixels/sec
282.229331 frames/sec - 314.967934 Mpixels/sec
287.112317 frames/sec - 320.417346 Mpixels/sec
bruno@LT_B:~> vblank_mode=0 glxgears
ATTENTION: default value of option vblank_mode overridden by environment.
ATTENTION: default value of option vblank_mode overridden by environment.
46614 frames in 5.0 seconds = 9322.669 FPS
46041 frames in 5.0 seconds = 9208.140 FPS
51578 frames in 5.0 seconds = 10315.562 FPS
52904 frames in 5.0 seconds = 10580.650 FPS

For some other comparison you might check https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/510130-Poor-performance-of-NVIDIA-driver-on-quot-Optimus-quot-laptop too.
And Gnome is beautiful here, so I think there is some quirk in the kernel for your brand new GPU…

Thank you, will continue on that thread.