How to tweak Intel HD graphics on Ubuntu 16.04

To disable power saving for both the CPU and GPU, add this to the grub kernel params:

i915.enable_rc6=0

Ex:

sudo nano /etc/default/grub

Edit the line containing GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" so that it looks like:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash i915.enable_rc6=0"

Save the file, and run the command sudo update-grub. Reboot.

Other tweaks include the standard lowering of resolutions and disabling animations.

16.04 ships with the latest Intel open-source driver.

I can testify that the tweaks within the Intel Control Panel on Windows are all placebo. I saw absolutely no benefit in enabling them. The IGP on Arrandale CPUs are so slow that any performance increases will be in the 0-2 fps range.

Edit: You may also want to try GameMode by Feral Interactive:

GameMode is a daemon/lib combo for Linux that allows games to request a set of optimisations be temporarily applied to the host OS and/or a game process.

GameMode was designed primarily as a stop-gap solution to problems with the Intel and AMD CPU powersave or ondemand governors, but is now host to a range of optimisation features and configurations.

Original answer:

In addition to what negusp mentioned, here are some other things you can do to get more graphics performance:

• Temporarily activate the CPU performance governer (the default setting for newer Intel CPUs is powersave)

    echo performance | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor
  

• Upgrade to the most recent HWE for the latest supported graphics drivers, kernel, X server

    sudo apt-get install --install-recommends linux-generic-hwe-16.04 xserver-xorg-hwe-16.04
  

• Upgrade your version of mesa for newer OpenGL support

  • Use the Ubuntu-X PPA for latest stable upstream mesa
  • Alternatively, use the Oibaf PPA for bleeding edge mesa

Full disclosure: I tried the above methods myself on my laptop (i5-3317U Ivy Bridge CPU with Intel HD Graphics 4000). I noticed OpenGL was a newer version but it didn't really seem to have any significant impact on graphics performance. As with anything else YMMV.