Intel Skylake Graphics: Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 16.04 + Latest Open-Source Driver Code

First up are the venerable Unigine tests for fully pushing the Intel HD Graphics 530 on the i5-6600K and the driver stacks...

With the two Unigine tests, we see that Linux 4.7 and Mesa 12.1-dev is faster than the Linux 4.4 / Mesa 11.2 experience found by default in Ubuntu 16.04. However, even with this bleeding-edge driver code the Linux OpenGL results were behind the Windows OpenGL results.

Tomb Raider on Windows at 1600 x 900 with low image quality settings led to over a 60 FPS average, but under Linux was halved to just about 30 FPS. There weren't any out-of-the-box tests on Ubuntu 16.04 for these GL4 games since Ubuntu 16.04's stack only has OpenGL 3.3 support.

When pushing Tomb Raider at 1080p, the results continued to be less than half the speed of the Windows build. Of course, that's not too surprising as Tomb Raider on Linux with AMD and NVIDIA graphics also performs more poorly than Windows.