Intel "Haswell" Iris Pro Linux Graphics Yield Some Wins Against Windows

While the updated Intel Linux driver (Linux 3.12 + Mesa 9.3-devel) was faster than the current Intel Windows 8 driver for Xonotic with low and high quality settings, the ultra quality settings make Linux lose. Using more advanced OpenGL settings lead to the frame-rate performance being a whole lot better with Windows 8 over Ubuntu.

The Plot3D test bundled within GpuTest is an interesting case where the Intel Linux OpenGL performance appears to regress with the updated code. The performance of the Iris Pro 5200 hardware started out being the same as the Windows 8 driver, but with Linux 3.12 + Mesa 9.3 is now noticeably slower.

Running the very intense OpenGL Furmark shows the Intel Linux driver stack improved a hell of a lot in recent months, but Windows 8 Pro with the latest September driver is much faster than Linux at this time.