Now tracked in %Iris as Default Driver in mesa/mesa instead.

Iris Status

Nearly mature and should be working for most things. A few known issues. Very close to conformant (but not official yet). Please give it a try and report bugs.

How to try it

Be sure you are using Kernel 4.18.11 or 4.19 or later. (Kernel 4.18.10 and older have memory leaks which iris will provoke.)

Simply export MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=iris before running your game, or download a wrapper script and run iris glxinfo.

If the GL_VENDOR string reports "Intel", you are using the new iris driver. If it reports "Intel Open Source Technology Center", you are using the older i965 driver.

$ glxinfo | grep 'GL vendor'
OpenGL vendor string: Intel Open Source Technology Center
$ MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=iris glxinfo | grep 'GL vendor'
OpenGL vendor string: Intel

This is sufficient to try it out for individual programs. If you want X/Glamor to use it, additional steps are required - X currently always looks for i965_dri.so.

Known Bugs

• ASTC 5x5 (GPU hang) and void extent (misrendering) workarounds missing
• Push constant queue depth workaround missing (GPU hang)
• xorg-server's PCI ID map still prefers i965
• See the Bugzilla Bug List

Conformance

We have not gone through the official OpenGL or OpenGL ES conformance submission process yet. We are passing 95% or more of Piglit, dEQP, and the GL/GLES CTS tests.

Games Tested

We've tested the following games:

• Bioshock Infinite
• Civilization VI
• DiRT Rally
• Portal
• Shadow of Mordor
• Tomb Raider
• XCOM 2: War of the Chosen
• Child of Light

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided currently misrenders.

Performance

Iris has dramatically lower CPU overhead than i965 - it can issue on average 5x more draw calls per second.

Most programs are now considerably faster on Iris. Some are not, let us know if you find any.

Icelake (Gen11+)

• Fully supported.

Tigerlake (Gen12+)

• The plan is for i965 to stop receiving new hardware support at Gen11. So for Tigerlake/Gen12, iris will be the only driver.

• We are preparing patches for upstreaming.

Features

Iris supports generally the same feature set as i965, with a few differences. The intention is to close this gap so Iris supports everything and then some.

New features:

• OpenGL 4.6 compatibility profile
• GL_AMD_pinned_memory
• GL_AMD_performance_monitor
• GL_ATI_fragment_shader

Missing:

• GL_3DFX_texture_compression_FXT1

  May not be worthwhile, no one uses it and Intel is the only vendor supporting it.

• GL_APPLE_object_purgeable

  ickle sent patches a while back, they could be revived at some point.

• GL_INTEL_performance_query

  We have GL_AMD_performance_monitor though, and frameretrace can use either one, so maybe it doesn't matter. I think only older GPA tools really used it.