Intel Linux Graphics Shine With Fedora 12

With World of Padman, which is also powered by the ioquake3 game engine, Fedora 12 finally had the best performance at every resolution. Fedora 10 outperformed Fedora 11 by a rather large margin, but Fedora 12 managed to up the performance a bit more. However, between 1024 x 768 and 1280 x 960, there was a rather noticeable drop in performance that was not encountered with Fedora 10 or 11.

Lastly, we have the results from Urban Terror. Fedora 12 was the clear winner here where it offered much better performance than 10 and 11. In fact, the frame-rate for Urban Terror in Fedora 12 was doubled of where it was at in Fedora 11.

While Fedora 12 did not offer the lowest CPU usage during the X-Video 1080p H.264 video playback, this may be attributed to changes with other Fedora packages between releases that are not related to the graphics stack. Even still, the CPU usage was only different by a few percent on a low-end, dual-core Celeron processor, which is not a big deal. In OpenArena, Fedora 11 was out in front at three resolution steppings, but failed at the others. In the other two tests, Fedora 12 was the clear winner. Compared to Fedora 11 especially, Fedora 12 offers much-improved Intel Linux graphics. Besides just the frame-rates being better, when using Fedora 12 we have encountered less problems with kernel mode-setting and quirks with different hardware configurations. In fact, the Intel experience is quite pleasant atop Fedora 12. This is good news for those running Fedora 12 now and should be even better news for those that will receive these updated packages in their distributions next year. By H1'2010, there will be newer Mesa, kernel, and xf86-video-intel releases that should improve the experience even more -- keeping in mind that Fedora 12 is even shipping with a version of Mesa that will not be released until Christmas.