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by morecoffee 3249 days ago
Intel driver support is pretty bad. If you aren't running with i915 at close to head there are easy to hit graphics bugs. Running most Steam games on Linux yields much worse performance and stability than running the same games on the same hardware with Windows.
1 comments

It's far from being a single variable here. WHen you talk about games, it's not just about the drivers, it's about what graphics API used as well, and how well the engine is optimized to run on OpenGL in the first place. Most engines are made with DirectX in mind so any quick port to OpenGL will lead to worse performance regardless of driver quality.
To be honest, I can put up with the less than graphics. What really got me was the regular hangs that would happen. I spent a fairly long time trying out different things to debug it, and eventually reported the hangs to the DRM list. While they were helpful, their answer was to update my kernel. It worked, but I am not comfortable having to run at head just to play old video games.