Ubuntu 12.04 vs. Windows 7: Intel Sandy/Ivy Bridge Loses On Linux

On the Windows side the latest Intel graphics driver was used at the time the testing was conducted (Intel 8.15.10.2696 driver) and the very latest Linux code was built from source at the time of testing. Atop the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS base, the Linux 3.4 development kernel was used, xf86-video-intel was pulled from its Git master source on 22 April, Mesa was pulled from Git master on 22 April (Mesa 8.1-devel git-e6aad9b), and libdrm was from Git master on the same date.

This testing is quite straightforward of comparing the Windows versus Linux OpenGL graphics performance for Intel Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge hardware, so let's jump to the results. Similar Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu 12.04 testing for AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce hardware has also been conducted for publishing in the coming days. All of this benchmarking under both platforms was fully automated and conducted in a easily reproducible manner using the Phoronix Test Suite software. The selection of OpenGL benchmarks used within the Phoronix Test Suite were test profiles that had native binaries for both Linux and Windows of similar quality.