October 07, 2012 -- While LLVMpipe may be a different story, when using hardware-accelerated graphics drivers with the recently released Unity 6.8 desktop, the performance doesn't change much. For at least one driver, there's even a new OpenGL performance regression under certain workloads. Here's some test results of Unity 6.6 vs. Unity 6.8 on the Radeon and Nouveau drivers.

September 29, 2012 -- With the recent release of the Unity 6.6 desktop for Ubuntu 12.10 Beta 2, benchmarks were done to see how the OpenGL gaming performance compares to that of Unity 6.4 from the earlier beta state of the Quantal Quetzal, plus the respective Compiz versions. At least for Intel Ivy Bridge graphics under some workloads, it looks like the Unity/Compiz updates are slowing down the GL performance even further.

September 26, 2012 -- In this article are benchmarks of ALUSA's Intel Atom Desktop that packs an Intel Atom D525 processor with Intel GMA 3150 graphics, 2GB of RAM, and a 500GB SATA disk. The benchmarks are from Ubuntu 10.10, Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS, and an Ubuntu 12.10 development snapshot to see how the performance has evolved since this Intel Atom CPU was introduced two years ago.

September 20, 2012 -- For those having computers with AMD FX "Bulldozer" processors, here are some benchmarks showing some of the performance improvements made -- and regressions -- in upstream GCC and the Linux kernel that can be found when upgrading to the forthcoming Ubuntu 12.10.

September 17, 2012 -- For those curious about the file-system performance of Ubuntu 12.10, here are some benchmarks from Quantal's Linux 3.5 kernel with the EXT4, XFS, and Btrfs file-systems.

September 14, 2012 -- Most often when benchmarking Intel hardware on Phoronix it's from the latest-generation "Ivy Bridge" or previous-generation "Sandy Bridge" families because, well, that's what is most interesting and exciting right now. Intel has made lots of open-source Linux driver advancements for this latest Intel hardware -- while simultaneously working on next-generation Haswell and Valley View support -- but how is their support standing for much older hardware? In this article are benchmarks from an Intel Atom with GMA3150 integrated graphics.

September 13, 2012 -- With a largely shared driver code-base across platforms, the binary graphics drivers offered by AMD and NVIDIA perform at roughly the same speed for OpenGL between Linux and Windows; that's traditionally been the case and what Phoronix benchmarks in prior years have shown for NVIDIA and AMD. However, the OpenGL performance difference between operating systems is beginning to widen due to compositing window managers and other factors now affecting the results to a greater extent. In this article are benchmarks of the proprietary NVIDIA graphics driver from Microsoft Windows 7 and then development snapshots of Ubuntu 12.10 with Unity and KDE desktops.

September 09, 2012 -- The latest Linux ARM benchmarks at Phoronix are comparing the performance of Gentoo Linux against Linaro 12.08 from a 1.4GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 development board.

September 07, 2012 -- Earlier this week when benchmarking the latest Unity and Compiz packages for Ubuntu 12.10, I mentioned a new OpenGL desktop comparison was forthcoming. Those results from the Ubuntu 12.10 development snapshot are now available with the default Unity desktop being compared to KDE, GNOME, Xfce, and LXDE. In no test did the Unity desktop yield the fastest performance with nearly every time the default Ubuntu desktop being left in last place for performance.

September 04, 2012 -- Updates were recently pushed into the Ubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" repository for the Unity desktop and Compiz compositing window manager. Performance improvements were talked about, but still there are big problems at hand. The recent Unity/Compiz updates have caused more OpenGL slowdowns, at least for those using Intel's popular open-source driver.