Linux Mint 13 Through Linux Mint 17 Benchmarks

C-Ray tends to be one of the benchmarks that benefits greatly from newer versions of the GNU Compiler Collection.

Well, the short story of Linux Mint 17's performance is that the disk/file-system performance with EXT4 seemed to regress compared to Linux Mint 16 on the lone system we have tested thus far.

The good news is that when it comes to the out-of-the-box OpenGL performance that tends to be higher or at least comparable to Linux Mint 16 depending upon the graphics card in use. Overall though, the newest Mesa / Linux kernel / X.Org stack provided on Linux Mint 17 provides some nice advantages for the open-source Intel / Radeon / Nouveau drivers. Besides the better performance, there's more OpenGL extension coverage and other features enabled by the newer stack compared to Mesa 9.2 and Linux 3.11 found in Linux Mint 16.

With the other computational tests, the results were largely unchanged with both Linux Mint 16 and Linux Mint 17 using the GCC 4.8 compiler.

Besides the performance, Linux Mint 17 offers big updates to the Cinnamon desktop, the newer Linux kernel provides new hardware support, and there's many other changes to find with this updated Ubuntu 14.04 derivative.