Fedora 13 vs. Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Benchmarks

Fedora 13 was released last week with a number of new features like Btrfs system rollback support and support for easily using the open-source 3D NVIDIA driver, but how does its performance compare to that of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, which was released a month earlier? We have the benchmarks today from three different systems to tell you.

Using the 64-bit versions of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and Fedora 13 we tested them independently on the following systems:

Opteron:
Processor: Quad-Core AMD Opteron 2384 @ 2.70GHz (Total Cores: 4), Motherboard: TYAN S2927/S2927-E, Chipset: nVidia MCP55, Memory: 4GB, Disk: 64GB AGILITY-EX, Graphics: ATI RV770 [Radeon HD 4870], Audio: ATI R6xx HDMI, Monitor: DELL S2409W

Core i7 Notebook:
Processor: Intel Core i7 CPU Q 720 @ 1.60GHz (Total Cores: 8), Motherboard: MSI LTD MS-1656, Chipset: Intel Core DMI, Memory: 6GB, Disk: 80GB INTEL SSDSA2MH08, Graphics: nVidia GT215 [GeForce GTS 250M], Audio: Realtek ALC888

Core i3:
Processor: Intel Core i3 CPU 530 @ 3.32GHz (Total Cores: 4), Motherboard: ECS H55H-M v1.0, Chipset: Intel Core, Memory: 2GB, Disk: 64GB OCZ-VERTEX, Graphics: Intel Core IGP 256MB, Audio: VIA VT1708S, Monitor: DELL P2210H

This represents a simple workstation, a ZaReason Verix notebook, and a Core i3 desktop with Intel integrated graphics. For reference, Fedora 13 ships with the Linux 2.6.33 kernel, GNOME 2.30.0 desktop, X.Org Server 1.8.0, xf86-video-radeon 6.13.0, xf86-video-nouveau 0.0.15, xf86-video-intel 2.11.0, Mesa 7.8.1, GCC 4.4.4, and an EXT4 file-system by default. This is while Ubuntu 10.04 ships with the Linux 2.6.32 kernel (but with selective back-ports from 2.6.33, such as with its graphics DRM), GNOME 2.30.0, X.Org Server 1.7.6, xf86-video-radeon 6.13.0, xf86-video-nouveau 0.0.15, xf86-video-intel 2.9.1, Mesa 7.7.1, GCC 4.4.3, and the EXT4 file-system.

The tests carried out included OpenArena, Warsow, World of Padman, PostgreSQL, Unpack-Linux, Bullet, C-Ray, x264, NAS Parallel Benchmarks, John The Ripper, and TTSIOD 3D Renderer. This testing was done by the Phoronix Test Suite.

With the ZaReason notebook boasting NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250M graphics and the open-source Nouveau Gallium3D driver not being used by default in either Ubuntu 10.04 LTS or Fedora 13, we had not tested this notebook in these graphics comparison tests. With OpenArena, the Opteron setup bearing the Radeon HD 4870 graphics were faster in Ubuntu 10.04 than Fedora 13 by about 13%. Meanwhile, however, with the Intel integrated graphics, the newer Linux graphics stack found in Fedora 13 was of benefit with its frame-rate being 13% in favor of the Red Hat sponsored OS.