How Ubuntu 16.04 Is Performing Compared To Five Other Linux Distributions

For those interested in how the graphics performance compares for the Broadwell i7-5775C's Iris Graphics, some out-of-the-box Mesa tests were done on Fedora 23, openSUSE 42.1, Ubuntu 15.10, and Ubuntu 16.04. CentOS 7 was left out due to being on a much older Mesa stack and Clear Linux was left out since it doesn't have packages/bundles for all of the graphics testing dependencies due to its lightweight server focus.

Fedora 23 tended to be much faster than openSUSE and Ubuntu out-of-the-box for the Intel Iris Graphics. Why such a big win for Fedora 23? In the past few months, Fedora 23's xf86-video-intel driver package (xorg-x11-drv-intel) has enabled DRI3 rendering by default. The other distributions still are defaulting to DRI2.

With Tesseract, Fedora 23 came out only a few frames faster than Ubuntu.

Unigine Valley is still far too slow for Intel Broadwell Iris Graphics.