Intel Graphics See Some Gains On Fedora 18

With Fedora 18 finally having been released last week, we're now onto extensively benchmarking this highly-anticipated but much-delayed Linux distribution. As a preview of what's to come, here's some early Intel Core i7 "Ivy Bridge" results on Fedora 18 "Spherical Cow" compared to the earlier Fedora 17 "Beefy Miracle" release.

Performance benchmarks of Fedora 18 are presently being carried out on several different systems at Phoronix looking at a variety of subsystems and test scenarios, just not compared to Fedora's predecessors but also to other operating systems / Linux distributions. Expect many articles in the coming days and weeks as the performance of Fedora 18 is closely analyzed.

For those with Intel's latest-generation hardware and relying upon the integrated HD 4000 graphics, here's a look at some of the OpenGL performance changes to find with Fedora 18 if upgrading from the Beefy Miracle.

All of the benchmark results in full, system details, system logs, etc are available from OpenBenchmarking.org. The results here are just a taste of these "Spherical Cow riding on Ivy Bridge" results. Results from the other GPUs/drivers will also come at a later date.

OpenArena 0.8.8 was consistently a bit faster on Fedora 18 with the tested Intel hardware compared to Fedora 17 from last year. Fedora 17 had the Linux 3.3 kernel with Mesa 8.0.2 while Fedora 18 is packing in the Linux 3.6 kernel with Mesa 9.0.1.

Fedora 18 was around 8% faster at the HD resolution on Intel's open-source driver.

At the lowest tested resolutions, Fedora 18 was slower than Fedora 17 for the "IVB" graphics, but things straightened out at the higher (and more common) resolutions. Based upon the results at the varying resolutions, it seems for Xonotic with Intel graphics on F17 there might have been some vsync issues.

Stay tuned for more benchmarks of Red Hat's Fedora 18 in the coming days. Any benchmark requests for Fedora 18 or for Linux/open-source software in general can be made by contacting me or Tweeting me.