Ubuntu 13.04 Desktop Comparison: 6 Desktops, 5 Driver/GPUs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu 13.04 Desktop Comparison: 6 Desktops, 5 Driver/GPUs

In this article are benchmarks of six different desktops (Unity, GNOME Shell, GNOME Classic, KDE Plasma, Xfce, and LXDE) on five different GPU/driver configurations (Radeon, Catalyst, Intel, NVIDIA, and Nouveau) running the very latest Ubuntu 13.04 "Raring Ringtail" development packages to look at the latest state of the Ubuntu Linux gaming OpenGL performance.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=18262

[ninez]

Wow (not that this is all that surprising!) but Nvidia (blob) certainly does wipe the floor with every other driver.

@Michael

it's too bad you didn't use the latest experimental-compiz-ppa ~ apparently, it fixes a bunch of problems and has many improvements. (although i am not positive if it works with untiy, quite yet); http://smspillaz.wordpress.com/2012/...-improvements/

Apparently, for Nvidia users it has some nice improvements... Myself, i have already moved to Cinnamon - but those using Nvidia/compiz should probably take a look.

[bug77]

...it's too bad you didn't use the latest experimental-XXX-ppa ~ apparently, it fixes a bunch of problems and has many improvements...

Don't they always?

[Linuxhippy]

These results indicate clearly the opposite of what KWin developers recently told the public: KWin simply isn't great for gaming.

[ninez]

Don't they always?

This particular PPA has fixes / performance improvements (especially for Nvidia blob) that are much more significant than some of the other times (especially for nvidia users), you may have heard similar things (but yeah, i get what you are saying).

These results indicate clearly the opposite of what KWin developers recently told the public: KWin simply isn't great for gaming.

I'm not sure what kwin is good for. I found it to be extremely buggy when i was trying it out, very recently. The window focus / shadow animation makes moving windows (with nvidia) slow until the animation is finished. their implementation of expo while great in theory, produced windows constantly being jittery / and other buggy behavior... I was kind of surprised at how buggy everything felt, so i didn't use kwin very long (or KDE for that matter).

[ua=42]

Gnome classic and LXDE on the chart are using the same shade of red. Which one was performing better? Also, why was unity and xfce were almost the same shade of red as well. Why?! There are other colors other than shades of red. Purple, blue, green, orange, etc. There is no reason to have 4 bars be two different shades of red.

[dungeon]

OpenBOX+nVidia+Debian for the lin.

[johnc]

Wow (not that this is all that surprising!) but Nvidia (blob) certainly does wipe the floor with every other driver.

Well the hardware was dramatically different. A GTX 680 shouldn't have any problem taking on the others.

But overall, the performance between desktops seemed relatively even IMO.

[ua=42]

Yeah. The only time you really noticed a difference was on the open source radeon and the open source nvidia. (which had kde significantly less).

[GreatEmerald]

Yea, seems like there is some bug in KWin and radeon drivers... I also don't seem to be hitting it myself, but then I'm not on the latest Ubuntu to begin with.