Ubuntu 14.04: Intel's Haswell Linux Driver Comes Up Short Of Windows 8.1

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 25 March 2014 at 12:00 AM EDT. Page 1 of 4. 9 Comments.

In complementing the recent Intel Iris Graphics 5100: Windows 8.1 vs. Ubuntu 14.04 and MacBook Air: OS X 10.9 vs. Ubuntu 14.04, here's some new Windows vs. Linux OpenGL benchmarks with this time looking at the performance for Intel's "Haswell" Core i7 4770K with HD Graphics 4600 using the latest driver releases on Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

This week on Phoronix are fresh benchmarks using the latest open and closed-source drivers for Intel HD Graphics, AMD Radeon, and NVIDIA GeForce hardware from a desktop with the popular Intel Core i7 4770K processor. The same system hardware was used throughout testing. For this article today the HD Graphics 4600 are being benchmarked under Windows 8.1 Pro x64 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS x86_64.

On the Windows side was the Intel 15.33.18.64.3496 driver release, which was released on 11 March and was the latest Iris/HD Graphics driver version at the time of testing. On the Linux side was the Linux 3.13 kernel and Mesa 10.1 as packaged for shipping in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. I was also going to test the Git versions of Mesa 10.2-devel and Linux 3.14, but with past benchmarks we haven't found too much change for the HD Graphics 4600 with these small updates relative to Linux 3.13 / Mesa 10.1, and these tests will represent the experience the far majority of Ubuntu 14.04 Intel Haswell users will see "out of the box" when using this major Linux distribution.

Windows 8.1 vs. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS - Intel HD Graphics Haswell

A variety of OpenGL games and other benchmarks were run on both platforms without making any hardware changes between the tests. All benchmarking on both Windows and Linux was handled in an open, fully transparent, and completely reproducible manner using the Phoronix Test Suite software and OpenBenchmarking.org.

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