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Increase integrated Intel GPU performance on Linux?
viral94 Mar 8, 2017
Hey everyone. I'm pretty new to the Linux community and had a question which can hopefully be answered.

I'm currently running a Windows 7/Ubuntu 16.10 dual-boot, and I recently installed a modified GPU (Intel HD 3000, it's an integrated GPU) driver on my Windows install, which gave me a significant framerate boost while gaming. The creators of said modified driver, however, unfortunately haven't provided Linux support for the driver, and my framerates in Ubuntu are considerably slower than on Windows. I did some searching and found this: [url=https://01.org/linuxgraphics/downloads/intel-graphics-update-tool-linux-os-v2.0.4], and I plan on updating my drivers on using the tool, but I'm led to believe that it won't do much and will just replicate the performance I got on Windows prior to installing the modded driver. Does anyone know of any modified Intel HD-series drivers for Linux, or any other solutions that would help increase performance? I know that integrated GPUs aren't necessarily meant for gaming, but hopefully some of you understand the struggle of gaming on a budget haha. Also I know that using modded drivers might not be safe and am well aware of the consequences. The games I play aren't even too graphics-intensive, lately I've been playing isometric RPGs Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny, but I just bought Torment: Tides of Numenera which uses the same technology as both games yet runs unbelievably slow (4-5 fps) using manufacturer drivers due to poor optimization (it runs pretty smoothly with the modded driver on Windows 7, though).

If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know, and thanks in advance!
lucinos Mar 8, 2017
Quoting: viral94Intel HD 3000

With HD 3000 you are probably out of luck as it is quite old and I think support is lower priority. Intel is a good idea from Haswell or later. I am actually pretty amazed as it exceeded my expectations from when I bought the laptop. In any case, gaming on desktop and not on laptop is recommended. But on laptop I always especially now say only intel and f*ck nvidia.
tuxintuxedo Mar 8, 2017
There is a Mesa stable ppa, with updated drivers (better than what the Intel graphics tool provides). Even so, you can expect slightly lower performance. First, most games are optimised for Windows/DirectX; second, the Intel Linux driver is very good featurewise, but the driver itself is not as optimized as its Windows counterpart.
And I only meant the normal Windows driver, not the modified one.
lucinos Mar 8, 2017
[double post]
lucinos Mar 8, 2017
QuoteFirst, most games are optimised for Windows/DirectX; second, the Intel Linux driver is very good featurewise, but the driver itself is not as optimized as its Windows counterpart.

It is true that games are optimized for windows/directx and so they will have better performance on windows but I do not think that the driver itself is not as optimized on linux. Driver itself is performing really good on linux especially the mesa 17.

Quoting: tuxintuxedoThere is a Mesa stable ppa, with updated drivers
yes getting recent mesa is really good. The ppa on ubuntu or just using an Arch-based distro is an easy way.
Samsai Mar 8, 2017
Make sure you are running the newest stable Mesa and a fairly up-to-date kernel. If possible, try to get faster RAM as the iGPU uses system memory as VRAM and remember to drop game settings as much as you can/need to. That's about the best you can do on Linux with these iGPUs. No modded drivers exist (none that perform any better anyway) and support is slowing down due to Sandy Bridge-era CPUs slowly becoming legacy. Ultimately your only option might be to upgrade.
viral94 Mar 15, 2017
Thanks for the responses everyone! I recently installed Mesa17 and my performance boosted a bunch because of that, so all hope is not lost, which I'm glad for considering ever since installing Ubuntu, Windows 7 is a lot more inconvenient. Go Linux. :-)
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