Clear Linux Continues To Have Graphics Performance Advantage Over Ubuntu

Earlier this week I published some Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux OpenGL benchmarks showing how the native gaming performance is different between the competing platforms. Ubuntu Linux lost nearly all of those results with the Intel Mesa driver to Windows 10. In this article are those previous benchmarks plus now having Intel Clear Linux benchmarks added in the mix. Months ago in previous tests we've found Clear Linux to have faster Linux graphics performance than other distributions.

Clear Linux 9810 was used for benchmarking and was powered by the Linux 4.7 kernel and Mesa 12.0. Ubuntu 16.04 was tested out-of-the-box with Linux 4.4 and Mesa 11.2 while also testing Ubuntu 16.04 when upgraded to Linux 4.7 and Mesa 12.1-dev Git. Windows 10 was using the latest proprietary Intel graphics driver. The same Intel Core i5 6600K system was used accross testing. If you're new here, the reason why in the system table the CPU frequency is different just comes down to the different distributions using different CPU scaling drivers reporting base vs. turbo frequency, etc. Same goes for any other hardware reported differences: the same system was used during testing.

In the earlier aforelinked Windows vs. Ubuntu testing, various Steam games were also tested in addition to the various tests exposed by the Phoronix Test Suite. However, Clear Linux doesn't yet support Steam: there's a mess of 32-bit libraries not packaged by the distribution. Hopefully Valve will migrate the Steam Linux client to being pure 64-bit soon enough, but for now at least there isn't the ability to run Steam games on Clear Linux. For those new to Clear Linux, it's also worth mentioning that only Intel graphics are supported with the Nouveau and Radeon DRM drivers being deactivated.

Anyhow, for those curious how Clear Linux with its latest packages are comparing to Ubuntu 16.04 and Windows 10, the latest numbers are on the pages ahead.