2D Also Bad For Ubuntu Unity Against KDE, GNOME, LXDE, Xfce

In continuation of last week's OpenGL benchmarks under Unity, GNOME, KDE, Xfce, and LXDE desktops from Ubuntu 12.10, here are benchmarks looking at the 2D performance of these different Linux desktop environment choices when testing both the Intel UXA and SNA acceleration back-ends.

From the same Intel Core i7 "Ivy Bridge" system as before, the CompuLab Intense-PC, here are Intel 2D graphics benchmarks with the Intel HD 4000 GPU when running Unity 6.4.0, KDE SC 4.9, GNOME Shell 3.5.4, the GNOME 3.5.5 fallback mode, Xfce 4.10, and LXDE 0.5.11. With most of these 2D benchmarks being windowed, the disabling of KDE KWin window effects on full-screen applications was not tested for this 2D article, unlike last week's results.

The Intel and SNA 2D acceleration architectures were tested from the xf86-video-intel 2.20.6 driver, which was the latest at the time of testing. Mesa 9.0-devel and the Linux 3.5 kernel as found in Ubuntu 12.10 were used for this benchmarking. SNA tends to work very well for Intel hardware with the modern xf86-video-intel driver but is not yet the default nor has it yet to be enabled by default as a distribution-specific feature for Ubuntu 12.10. All benchmarking was handled in a fully automated fashion thanks to the open-source cross-platform Phoronix Test Suite software.