Intel SNB Linux Driver Can Out Run Windows Driver

With OpenArena, the Linux frame-rate began being higher than Windows, but its performance ended up degrading more severely at the higher resolutions than the SNB mobile Windows driver degrades. Fortunately, OpenArena is not too demanding of a game and the average frame-rate with the open-source Linux driver was 86.1 FPS, which is more than sufficient for most purposes, where as the Windows 7 driver had a 95.6 FPS average.

With the Lightsmark OpenGL lighting benchmark, the Intel classic Mesa driver score for the Core i5 2520M came in at 25 FPS where as the Windows 7 driver was up at 33 FPS.