Intel and their open source engineers have just released their new automated installer for Intel graphics currently available only for Ubuntu 13.10 and Fedora 19. Once you’ve installed Intel’s HD Graphics support, the SNA gets enabled by default and power savings improvements for 4th Generation Intel® Core™ processors with Intel HD Graphics are also pre-configured.
Some key points about the new drivers …
– Support for Intel Celeron N281 CPU w/Intel HD Graphics
– SandyBridge’s New Acceleration (SNA) enabled by default on all UXA-supported hardware
– Power saving improvements for “Haswell” chips w/Intel HD Graphics
– Driver support for Iris Pro 5200, and Intel HD 5000 & 5100 graphics
– MPEG-2 encoding improvements for 3rd and 4th Gen Intel CPUs paired with Intel HD Graphics
– Rendering fix for DotA on Wine
For those of you who want to delve into hardware chit-chat, the SNA (aka SandyBridge’s New Acceleration) is a xf86-video-intel acceleration method that allows better 2D performance (like Desktop applications). According to Intel, this new technology comes with better performance, better stability, and more active development, this is now on the default that is tested and validated on the Intel® Linux Graphics Stack. Although it contains the codename SandyBridge in its name, this new acceleration method supports all Intel platforms that were already supported by UXA (Unified Acceleration Architecture).
Intel-gpu-tools is now part of a quarterly stack release. It is a collection of tools for development and testing of the Intel DRM. Latest released version provides a very robust test framework, performance analizers, validation scripts, and a easy way for end users to collect logs for easy and better bug reports. It also has the traditional tools for gpu snapshots, register dumping, read, and writes. Intel-gpu-tools 1.4 was used on 2013Q3 tests and validation.
There have been many bug fixes and performance improvements in many parts of Intel Linux Graphics stack. In this release, support has been added or refined for the recently released Intel Celeron N2810 processor with Intel HD Graphics.
