Windows 10 vs. Linux OpenGL/Vulkan Driver Performance With Intel Icelake Iris Plus Graphics

Valve's Dota 2 game continues working reliably on both Windows and Linux thus working out well when it comes to a cross-OS comparison for looking at driver quality. While being one of the lighter games, even with the latest-generation Iris Plus Graphics it still was difficult at 1080p (yeah, a bit over-estimated the Gen11 Iris capabilities when kicking off this round of testing...) with OpenGL to crack 30 FPS under Linux. The Intel Iris Gallium3D driver was running faster than the default i965 OpenGL driver, but even in the best Ubuntu driver configuration, the Windows 10 GL performance was still 30% higher.

When looking at the Vulkan performance with Dota 2, Windows 10 was still delivering higher frame-rates.

With the very lightweight Portal game that could obviously run with ease on the Intel Ice Lake graphics, Windows 10 was about 25% faster than the current Intel OpenGL Linux drivers for the Gen11 graphics hardware.