Ubuntu 10.10 Benchmarks

The Intel Core i3 system with integrated graphics on the open-source Intel Mesa driver was sadly not capable of running Nexuiz with our test profile settings on any of the past three Ubuntu releases. However, when running these three Ubuntu releases on the ThinkPad notebook with the NVIDIA proprietary drivers that are available in the Karmic, Lucid, and Maverick repositories, there wasn't any real performance difference to be found with the Quadro NVS 140M GPU.

With Warsow on the ASRock Core 100HT the newer Arrandale graphics were not in a great state when Ubuntu 10.04 LTS shipped earlier this year so the performance had suffered. However, with Ubuntu 10.10 that has the latest Mesa 7.9 release, the performance has improved significantly. However, Warsow is still barely playable with a resolution of 1680 x 1050. On the ThinkPad T61 system the performance has actually regressed in each succeeding release either in NVIDIA's proprietary Linux driver or elsewhere in the stack.

Turning from OpenGL gaming and to Apache web-page serving performance, there was a performance hit between Ubuntu 9.10 and Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS, but an improvement is to be found with Ubuntu 10.10. The Ubuntu 10.10 Apache performance is definitely better, but still not at the Ubuntu 9.10 performance levels. These performance changes are likely attributed in large part to the EXT4 file-system changes in past kernel releases, as we have talked about extensively in numerous articles and reviews.

The PostgreSQL database server takes a large performance hit between Ubuntu 9.10 and 10.04.1 LTS, which is due to EXT4 changes in the Linux 2.6.32 kernel as we confirmed previously. Between Ubuntu 10.04.1 and 10.10 the performance has not changed too much, but the number of transactions per second carried out does appear to be slightly lower than in the Lucid Lynx.