Intel "Haswell" Iris Pro Linux Graphics Yield Some Wins Against Windows

When starting things off with OpenArena 0.8.5 as it has quality native binaries for both Windows and Linux, the updated Linux graphics stack is able to win against the Intel Windows 8 driver that was released last week. For this rather CPU-limited game, the Ubuntu 13.04 performance was slower than Windows 8 but once loading in the latest Linux 3.12 development kernel and Intel Mesa 9.3 driver, the game changed and is sharply ahead.

The newer OpenArena 0.8.8 release that makes more use of GLSL and other GL2-level features was similar in that updating the Intel Linux graphics driver stack to the very latest bleeding-edge code as of this week yields a win over Windows 8 with the Intel 15.31.17.3257 graphics driver.

While Linux experienced wins in the OpenArena games that aren't too demanding and relying upon the ioquake3 engine, when turning to the very demanding Unigine Engine, the Iris Pro favored Windows. The Windows 8 Pro performance was much better for Unigine Sanctuary than with Ubuntu Linux. The Intel Windows driver for the Haswell Ultrabook with Iris Pro 5200 graphics was nearly 50% faster than the current open-source Linux driver code.