Ubuntu 9.04 vs. Mac OS X 10.5.6 Benchmarks

Starting with the ioquake3-based Urban Terror game, the latest release in the Leopard family was off to a strong lead. Mac OS X with the integrated Intel 945 graphics was able to average out at 17 frames per second while Ubuntu 9.04 was much slower at 10.50 FPS. A combination of the Intel Linux graphics driver stack going through invasive changes, the Intel OS X driver stack being more advanced and already using LLVM to compile and optimize shaders, and the traditional Mesa stack on Linux not being the best or fastest, has led to strong advantages for the Cupertino OS.

When increasing the screen resolution for Urban Terror from 800 x 600 to 1024 x 768, Mac OS X 10.5.6 did not drop in FPS but actually had a faster average FPS by one frame. Ubuntu 9.04 had dropped from 10 FPS to 7 FPS. These numbers will hopefully improve for Ubuntu once the Gallium3D driver architecture is being used and has been stabilized.

After stepping up the resolution from 1024 x 768 to 1280 x 1024, the OS X performance had dropped slightly but was still running above 15 FPS. Ubuntu on the other hand was pushing out just four frames per second -- the Jaunty Jackalope was nearly four times slower.