Very poor performance drivers for Intel® HD Graphics 4600

Question

I am new to Ubuntu and Linux. I have a HP Envy 17'' laptop and it comes with an i7-4710HQ processor with integrated Intel® HD Graphics 4600. I have Ubuntu 15.04 installed and I also installed the recently released Intel graphic drivers for the system.

The problem is that the graphics quality is very poor (with the original Ubuntu 15.04 drivers and also after the update). The screen continuously flickers with netflix videos and especially even very light games, like supertux2. I dual boot with windows 7 and I have no problems when in windows.

Before this Ubuntu installation I had Linux Mint 17.2 and I am pretty sure that the graphics performance was better, even though Mint 17 is based on Ubuntu 14.04... Not 100% sure, though.

Any ideas to improve this? If you need more data, please let me know how to get it. Again, I am new to Linux.

Thanks in advance,

David

Unity support test:

OpenGL vendor string:   Intel Open Source Technology Center
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Intel(R) Haswell Mobile 
OpenGL version string:  3.0 Mesa 10.6.0

Not software rendered:    yes
Not blacklisted:          yes
GLX fbconfig:             yes
GLX texture from pixmap:  yes
GL npot or rect textures: yes

Compiz supported:         yes

Answer 1

Bit old to answer, but AFAIK, the Intel driver's graphics performance is dependent on the version of mesa installed, which in your case seems to be 10.6.0 and also the kernel.

So if you have not done so already, you could update to Ubuntu 16.04 which has an updated graphics and kernel stack (mesa 11.2.0 and linux-4.4).