Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance On The Intel Core Ultra 7 Meteor Lake

First up are some of the graphics benchmarks with being particularly curious over the integrated Arc Graphics performance... On Linux the Arc Graphics performance was already great in being a huge generational leap, leading performance-per-Watt, and comparable or better results to the RDNA3 integrated graphics found with the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U. So I was quite curious going into this to see if the Intel open-source Linux graphics driver was doing better or worse than the launch-day Windows driver support.

With the demanding GravityMark Vulkan benchmark, the Linux performance was at 85% the speed of the Windows 11 driver. This is respectable for launch day considering Intel doesn't invest as many resources into their consumer Linux GPU support as their Windows driver team. And even at 85% the speed of the Windows score, the Intel Arc Graphics were already performing much better generationally and battling the AMD RDNA3 integrated graphics. So closing this gap will look even better for Meteor Lake moving forward on Linux.

With the Unigine OpenGL benchmarks, the Windows performance was better than the Linux tests with Mesa 24.0-devel + Linux 6.7-rc5. At least the open-source Linux support is already at 90%+ the Windows speed for launch-day.

The Xonotic first-person shooter game saw mixed results between Windows and Linux with the performance being comparable between the two operating system configurations tested.

ParaView as the cross-platform visualization software saw better performance on Linux. Though this isn't purely a GPU-bound test but also relies on multi-threaded work too so the CPU performance is playing a greater role here than for some of the graphics benchmarks.