Fedora 12 vs. Ubuntu 9.10 Benchmarks

Starting with the graphics tests, we were rather dumbfounded. Fedora is supposed to be a more server/workstation oriented distribution where as Ubuntu is largely focused upon the Linux desktop, but with our first gaming test these results were certainly not what we had expected. We were using the same driver on Ubuntu and Fedora, yet there is an incredible difference in the results. This NVIDIA notebook GPU yielded a frame-rate of 144 FPS under Fedora 12 but just an average 73 FPS with Ubuntu 9.10 when playing World of Padman. Fedora 12 is using the newer X Server 1.7 release, but this should not cause a huge fluctuation in the performance especially in the case of NVIDIA's binary driver that does not use much of the traditional Linux graphics infrastructure. These results have yet to be explained, but for those not familiar with the Phoronix Test Suite, each test is run multiple times and these large performance differences have been confirmed.

The delta was not as huge, but Fedora 12 again whooped Ubuntu 9.10 when it came to the OpenGL gaming performance with Warsow. Fedora 12 had a modest 35 FPS for its average while Ubuntu 9.10 was back at 28 FPS.

Turning away from the graphics testing, Fedora kicked Ubuntu 9.10 again, but this time it was with the PostgreSQL performance via pgbench. Fedora 12's numbers were nearly 16% better than Ubuntu Karmic.