Windows 8 Outperforming Ubuntu Linux With Intel OpenGL Graphics

While the Intel Open-Source Technology Center, the group within Intel responsible for the Intel HD Linux graphics driver, continues making improvements, there is a lot left to be desired. There are some performance improvements when moving to Mesa 9.2-devel and Linux 3.9 that are very noticeable for Nexuiz, but the performance from the same Intel Ultrabook was much lower with Linux. Windows 8 and its Intel OpenGL driver were carrying the advantage over Ubuntu at all of the resolutions tested.

For the lax OpenArena 0.8.5 game, at 1024 x 768 the game was much faster with Windows 8 but the margin narrowed greatly when reaching the ultrabook's native resolution of 1366 x 768. The performance of this old ioquake3-powered game was nearly the same between operating systems.