Ubuntu 13.10 Performance On Intel Core i7 "Haswell"

It's unfortunate that more of these Intel Haswell OpenGL performance optimizations for Linux didn't land in released versions of the Linux kernel and Mesa prior to Haswell's debut, but that's simply how things played out. There are also more Intel Linux OpenGL performance optimizations for these new graphics cores still out on the horizon. Fortunately through using the Ubuntu-X PPA, the Ubuntu mainline kernel PPA, and other approaches, Linux desktop enthusiasts can fetch the latest performance-improving code, but it's still not something I would recommend a newbie try to upgrade over risk of breaking the desktop.

The only thing Ubuntu 13.10 has over Ubuntu 13.04 when it comes to the compute tests is moving from Linux 3.8 to Linux 3.9, which doesn't mean much in this case, and then from GCC 4.7 to GCC 4.8. GCC 4.8 does support the new Intel Core CPUs better, but it won't offer dramatic performance changes for most workloads.