The First Benchmarks Of Unity On XMir: There's A Performance Hit

When it comes to the desktop support for Mir, only the open-source Intel / Radeon / Nouveau drivers support Mir for the time being while if using the proprietary NVIDIA and AMD Catalyst drivers will fallback to using just a simple X.Org Server on the hardware. NVIDIA and AMD will likely begin supporting Mir in due time, but for Ubuntu 13.10 they will maintain the X.Org fallback support. For this initial testing, only Intel graphics were tested in the form of HD 3000 "Sandy Bridge" graphics hardware from a Core i5 CPU found on an HP EliteBook that served as part of Intel's Software Development Vehicle for Sandy Bridge. Benchmarks from other hardware/drivers will come in July and as Mir matures.

All of this benchmarking under Unity on XMir and then on an X.Org Server without any Mir or unity-system-compositor was done via the open-source Phoronix Test Suite cross-platform benchmarking software. So on the following pages are our results when testing the Intel open-source Linux graphics atop Unity with XMir interfacing with the Mir Display Server as of 27 June and then when running the X.Org Server directly without any Mir interference.