Windows 8 Outperforming Ubuntu Linux With Intel OpenGL Graphics

Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has made immense progress on the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver stack in recent years, namely with Sandy Bridge and later generations. Everything has been coming together nicely with continued performance optimizations for both 2D and 3D, there continues to be enhancements done to areas like VA-API video playback acceleration, power management, and other features. Sadly though, these results show that for some of the common cross-platform OpenGL games out there, Intel HD 4000 "Ivy Bridge" graphics are no longer at a performance parity to Windows 8 with the Intel driver.

Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge were looking really good under Linux for a while against Windows (Windows 7 at the time), but then the Intel Windows developers rolled out some more highly tuned updates. The Windows driver is also advancing in the area of OpenGL 4.x support where as the Intel OTC developers working on the Linux driver are still dabbling with OpenGL 3.2 compliance. It's unlikely before year's end we'll see Intel reach OpenGL 4.0 compliance on the Linux side -- at least they were in very good shape in getting OpenGL ES 3.0 support done timely. The Windows Intel driver also handles OpenCL fine on the graphics side while on the Linux side there is no concerted action for improving Intel OpenCL. Intel does offer their closed-source OpenCL SDK for running OpenCL on the CPU, but without graphics integration. The Intel Linux side only has the less-than-complete Beignet.

Intel Haswell products will be released soon enough and it will be interesting to see how the Linux versus Windows performance compares at that time. Right now, it looks like the Intel Linux driver has fairly good "out of the box" support in place for Haswell.

Coming up next on Phoronix will be a power consumption comparison and other new data points for this Intel ASUS Ultrabook with Windows 8 and Linux. There will also be a comparison to the older Windows 7 release too, against Linux in other configurations. If you wish to see other such cross-platform comparisons done for other hardware and more thorough analysis, please highly consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium, disabling AdBlock, and/or making a PayPal contribution. Many of the tests are very time consuming and in cases such as today's testing the hardware has to be purchased at retail when vendors aren't willing to work with us for having a Linux site dabble with Windows-loaded PCs.