How Ubuntu 16.04 Is Performing Compared To Five Other Linux Distributions

With the Xonotic gaming benchmarks, Fedora 23 was again at the front due to its DRI3 by-default.

To dig through more of the graphics benchmarks, see this OpenBenchmarking.org result file. For all of the other tests as part of the six-way comparison, see this OpenBenchmarking.org result file. In a follow-up article I'll also have more i7-5775C Linux graphics tests from Linux 4.5, Mesa 11.3-devel, etc.

Similar to last month's 10-way Linux distribution battle, Clear Linux was again running at the top of the pack thanks to its aggressive compiler optimization flags by default and other default enhancements in the name of performance. Their prebuilt packages (or bundles as they call it on their distribution) for R and other key libraries also make use of function multi-versioning, AutoFDO, and other performance tweaks. Of course, there's nothing stopping anyone from optimizing their own distribution after the fact and rebuilding packages to their desire for greater performance, besides time, sanity, and knowledge, while this testing is focused on the out-of-the-box performance where each OS can be quickly deployed.

If looking for a more desktop-focused or general purpose distribution, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is shaping up very well and offering nice performance. For the out-of-the-box Intel graphics performance, Fedora 23 was doing the best since they ship new Mesa/kernel updates as standard release updates on their platform and they also have enabled DRI3 support by default for delivering better performance while (ideally) reducing tearing and other issues.