Intel OpenGL Performance: OS X vs. Windows vs. Linux

Beginning with Lightsmark, which is available for Linux and Windows but does not exist for Mac OS X, the results are unfortunate if you're a Linux user. While the Intel OpenGL Linux performance was improved each step of the way going from Ubuntu 12.04 to Ubuntu 12.10 development to Ubuntu 12.10 development with the latest Intel Git code, it still doesn't match the Windows OpenGL performance of the official Intel driver. The Intel Windows OpenGL driver was 15% faster than the very latest Linux graphics driver code for this several year old OpenGL 2.x lighting benchmark.

With OpenArena 0.8.5, which is an older version of the ioquake3-powered game and not using GLSL or other advanced OpenGL features, the Linux performance continued to improve each step of the way. The Ubuntu Linux performance for OpenArena 0.8.5 was faster than what's offered by OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, but Windows 7 was significantly faster for this Intel Core i5 "Sandy Bridge" processor with HD 3000 graphics. The Intel Windows 7 graphics driver was 55% faster than the latest Intel Linux driver code.

When moving to the latest OpenArena release (v0.8.8) that now takes advantage of GLSL shaders, bloom, and other more modern OpenGL features, the Windows 7 and Linux performance was close at a low resolution of 1280 x 1024.