Ubuntu 7.10 vs. Early Ubuntu 8.04 Benchmarks

Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 2 is due out tomorrow, and while we'll have more extensive testing as the Hardy Heron release nears in April, today we are publishing our first -- very initial -- benchmarks of Ubuntu 8.04 using the 12-19-2007 daily build and comparing these results to Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon. These tests are focused upon OpenGL gaming, encoding, disk, and memory performance.

Since the release of Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 1 at the end of November, there has been the Debian Import Freeze for Hardy Heron, which came just a week ago. For our testing we had used the daily Ubuntu 8.04 Desktop LiveCD (32-bit) from 12-19-2007. For testing we had used the stock Ubuntu package set, aside from manually installing the NVIDIA 169.04 Beta driver.

The Linux benchmarks used had consisted of Enemy Territory, Doom 3, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, LAME encoding, Ogg encoding, Gzip compression, hdparm disk reads, and RAMspeed. The test system was made up of an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ AM2 processor, 2GB of DDR2-800 memory, and an Abit NF-M2 nView motherboard.