Intel "Haswell" Iris Pro Linux Graphics Yield Some Wins Against Windows

Besides Furmark, the GpuTest Triangle workload was also in favor of Windows 8 by a huge margin.

The two pixmark tests within GpuTest were competitive between Linux and Windows when each platform was using the very latest Intel Haswell graphics drivers.

The open-source Intel Linux graphics driver for their latest-generation Haswell HD / Iris graphics hardware didn't win in all of the OpenGL gaming tests used today. In cases where the Linux driver lost to Windows 8, the margins were generally quite high. Even so, the Intel "Haswell" Linux performance did much better than expected -- and the performance has certainly improved a heck of a lot compared to when Haswell hardware was first supported in Ubuntu 13.04, as these results also show.

The Intel Linux OpenGL driver is still evolving day-by-day, but there's a long road ahead. Most of the loses for the Intel Linux driver in today's tests were in the more demanding OpenGL test cases -- like GpuTest, Unvanquished, Xonotic (Ultra), and Unigine. The Linux driver is also GL3-only while the Windows support has GL 4.x support and numerous other features not yet found in the Linux driver. This situation will hopefully only improve at a more brisk pace now that Intel has a growing Android presence -- where the same Mesa driver is used -- and with the new Atom SoCs bearing in-house HD graphics that are also supported by this same open-source code-base for Linux.

As always, stay tuned for plenty more benchmarks on Phoronix to see how the Intel OpenGL Linux performance evolves and other interesting hardware reviews and performance comparisons for all classes of hardware.