Windows 11 vs. Linux Benchmarks For Intel Arc B-Series "Battlemage" Shows Strengths & Weaknesses

First up was the GravityMark benchmark given it's native to both Windows and Linux, of similar quality on both platforms, and is reliable as a test for exercising the GPU drivers. At 1080p with the OpenGL renderer the Ubuntu Linux performance came out well ahead of Windows 11... Not too surprising given that the Intel Iris Gallium3D driver has been worked on extensively for years and is largely in great shape. Meanwhile OpenGL on Windows remains on the decline.

At 1440p for GravityMark with OpenGL, the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver remained much faster than Windows on all three tested Intel Arc graphics cards. But it is concerning on both Windows and Linux to see the B580 coming behind the A580... Clearly more Battlemage driver improvements are needed.

When running with GravityMark on Vulkan, the tables are turned between the operating systems: the Intel Windows Vulkan driver is outperforming the Intel ANV open-source Vulkan driver on Linux by a wide margin.

At 1440p, the Vulkan code path with GravityMark continued performing much better on Windows than Linux -- the complete opposite of the OpenGL results. The Arc B580 performance in GravityMark continued to show room for improvement as well.

The Vulkan ray-tracing results with GravityMark show the significant optimizations still left to be tackled by the Intel ANV Vulkan Linux driver developers.... The ANV driver developers have been making steady progress on ray-tracing support but it's far behind what is found with Intel ray-tracing capabilities on Windows.

3D Mark Wild Life that is native to each platform showed Windows running faster but not by too extreme margins. The Arc A580 on Linux was strangely slow for 3DMark Wild Life but the A770 and B580 on Linux were at around 89% the performance found on Windows 11.

But when pushing 3DMark Wild Life Extreme to 4K on both platforms, the Linux results showed some apparent driver limitations with no scaling while Windows 11 was around 66% faster than the current Intel Battlemage Linux performance.