Fedora 13 vs. Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Benchmarks

When running the Warsow gaming test, both the Intel and Radeon graphics had favored Fedora 13 over Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. The Mesa stack found in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS has a bug with Warsow where its frame-rate is consistently low (2~3 FPS) with the Radeon R600/700 ASICs, but this has since been resolved and is fine with Mesa 7.8.1 in Fedora. Improvements in the Clarkdale graphics performance with the Fedora 13 packages led to its frame-rate being 77% higher than under Ubuntu's Lucid Lynx.

With the World of Padman game, Fedora 13 was again favored when using the open-source Radeon and Intel graphics drivers. The Radeon graphics were over 20% faster with Fedora 13 and incredibly more than two and a half times faster with the Intel Clarkdale IGP. Also worth noting is that Ubuntu does use Compiz desktop effects by default, which can cause a performance penalty.

After finishing off the OpenGL benchmarking between Ubuntu and Fedora we next turned to the PostgreSQL database performance. The Opteron system was about 5% faster with the number of transactions per second when running Fedora 13, but with the ZaReason notebook and its Core i7 CPU it was 13% faster when running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. Lastly, Fedora 13 pulled another win with the Core i3 desktop where its TPS count was 42% higher than the Ubuntu Long-Term Support release.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS was consistently faster than Fedora 13 across all three systems when measuring the time to unpack the Linux 2.6.32 kernel source-code, but the margins were not too big between the two Linux operating systems.