Intel Skylake Graphics: Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 16.04 + Latest Open-Source Driver Code
As part of the celebrations with Phoronix turning 12 years old earlier this month I ran some fun tests looking at the Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux gaming performance with the new NVIDIA Pascal GPUs and also a Windows 10 vs. RadeonSI Gallium3D vs. AMDGPU-PRO comparison on the AMD side. To finish things up, here is a fresh comparison of Intel Skylake HD Graphics under Windows 10 and Ubuntu 16.04.
For this testing Microsoft Windows 10 Pro x64 was first tested with the latest public Intel HD Graphics driver. Following that tests were done under Ubuntu 16.04 both with the stock packages and when upgrading to the latest Git state: the Linux 4.7 kernel and Mesa 12.1-dev. Only when upgrading to the latest components (Mesa 12.0 and newer) is there OpenGL 4.3 support for Intel Skylake (and Broadwell) compared to OpenGL 3.3 as is found out-of-the-box on Ubuntu 16.04 with older Mesa releases. Thus only with the latest Git code is the Intel stack now capable of running many modern Linux games. For more details about games that do or don't work with the current Intel Linux driver, see the recent Trying Various OpenGL 4.x Games On Linux With An Intel Skylake Core i5.
The cross-platform native graphics tests used for this article included Tomb Raider, Shadow of Mordor, Talos Principle, Metro Last Light Redux, Unigine Heaven, Unigine Valley, Xonotic, and GpuTest. Where supported the tests were run in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.