Intel Atom N270 Still Sees Some Gains On Linux

Let's begin with some OpenGL benchmark results for the Intel i945 graphics.

There was a big performance improvement going from Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS for the i945 graphics that are rather slow but quite common to the original netbooks before NVIDIA's ION and now Intel's Atom chips with PowerVR graphics. With Ubuntu 12.10 there is not much change over Ubuntu 12.04 LTS at this time since the Mesa version was still 8.0 as Canonical has not yet pulled in the newer Mesa 8.1, but will be done before the October release.

The newer OpenArena release that makes use of GLSL and other features is obviously much slower and too demanding for this old Intel IGP.