Windows 8.1 Still Outperforms Linux With Latest Intel GPU Drivers

The results varied for the GpuTest OpenGL micro-benchmarks, however, overall Windows 8.1 with the latest Intel proprietary driver was much faster than Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with the newest open-source Intel Linux graphics driver code via the Linux 3.15 kernel and Mesa 10.3-devel code.

The Intel Linux graphics driver is constantly improving, but for Haswell HD Graphics 4600 it appears the raw OpenGL faster is still faster on Windows. The Intel Windows driver still also leads with its OpenGL 4.x support, working OpenCL/GPGPU support compared to the still-experimental Intel Beignet Linux OpenGL support, and various other smaller features not found within Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver. It will be interesting to see though how the out-of-the-box Intel Broadwell support compares between Ubuntu Linux and Windows 8.1 as soon as the next-generation processors premiere.