A Historical Look At Intel Ironlake Graphics Performance

With Nexuiz, there was a performance regression for the Intel Core i3 Arrandale CPU between Ubuntu 10.04.2 LTS and Ubuntu 10.10, but regardless with either distribution release the Intel IGP was far too slow to run Nexuiz at a modest frame-rate even at 800 x 600. With Sandy Bridge hardware, Intel can finally better handle Nexuiz. With Ubuntu 11.04 + Git from the Linux 2.6.39 kernel and Mesa 7.11-devel, the frame-rate goes up by 4.5x thanks to recent Intel performance optimizations. Most users will begin seeing these improvements with Ubuntu 11.10 or as part of updates on Fedora 15.

The OpenArena frame-rate was largely unchanged between the tested Ubuntu releases.

The World of Padman performance had a nice performance boost on Ironlake hardware between Ubuntu 10.10 and Ubuntu 11.04.

Similarly, Urban Terror also on the ioquake3 engine had a nice boost when moving from Ubuntu 10.10 to the new Ubuntu 11.04 release.