Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 17.04 With Intel Kabylake Mobile Graphics

While we've seen the Radeon Linux OpenGL driver get competitive to the Windows Radeon OpenGL driver and the NVIDIA Windows/Linux OpenGL binary drivers have long been on a level playing field, how's the Intel HD Graphics performance? Here are some quick and fresh benchmarks this weekend.

In our past Kabylake Windows vs. Linux graphics comparisons, the Windows performance has remained faster than the open-source i965 Mesa driver. With past generations of Intel graphics, it's generally not been until they are a few generations old before we see the Linux OpenGL performance mature to be reasonably on par with the Windows performance.

With having a Razer Stealth laptop in the labs for Linux testing, I did some quick tests of Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 17.04 for this system. The laptop is equipped with an Intel Core i7 7500U Kabylake CPU, which sports HD Graphics 620 that clock up to 1.05GHz.

This Razer Stealth laptop isn't designed to be a gaming notebook and for limited time available, I just ran some of our automated OpenGL tests known to be of similar quality under Windows and Linux. Thus not any Direct3D Windows vs. OpenGL Linux gaming comparison or the like today, especially given this isn't a particularly fast system for gaming... So not the big, multi-page comparisons you usually find on Phoronix but just some cursory measurements. Later on if there is enough interest I'll do a cross-OS gaming comparison on more capable Intel desktop hardware or when getting my hands on a new Razer gaming notebook.

The latest Intel Windows binary driver release was used while on the Ubuntu 17.04 side I tested the integrated Zesty stack (Linux 4.10 + Mesa 17.0.7) and then again when using the Linux 4.13 Git kernel and the Mesa 17.3-devel drivers via the Padoka PPA. All benchmarks were done in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.