Running Ubuntu 9.10 With Older PC Hardware

Starting with the ioquake3-powered Tremulous test profile, you will notice the results from Ubuntu 9.10 are missing. Mesa's Radeon driver was running at less than five frames per second most of the time with this R300-series mobile GPU, but ultimately the system would lock up halfway through the testing process. Ubuntu 9.04 had a very low frame-rate with Tremulous, but at least it would run all the way through the test. This is in starch contrast to Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10 where the Mobility Radeon X300 was running with around 30 frames per second.

Next up the Phoronix Test Suite charted the CPU usage while MPlayer was playing a 1080p H.264 video file using X-Video acceleration. The results were of course mixed, but when averaging the collected percentages Ubuntu 8.10 ended up having the highest overall CPU usage during the video playback process. Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10 faired the best.

The 7-Zip compression performance between the Hardy Heron, Intrepid Ibex, Jaunty Jackalope, and Karmic Koala releases were identical.