Intel Linux Driver Almost Neck-And-Neck With Windows 8.1

The Xonotic open-source first person shooter's performance was similar between Windows 8.1 Pro x64 and Ubuntu 13.10 with no major changes out of the kernel or Mesa upgrades. However, as the Xonotic game's visual quality settings were increased, the lead for the Intel Windows driver had widened up over Linux.

While there's still work left to do with the open-source Intel driver and it doesn't yet have OpenGL 4 support, the Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers continue to be making very good progress. Coming up in December will be similar Intel Haswell benchmarks to see where things stand for the latest-generation Intel hardware. On a related note, when comparing open-source graphics drivers on Linux, this morning I also published a 21-way Linux GPU comparison that did include the Core i7 4770K "Haswell" with HD Graphics 4600 results.