Intel Skylake Graphics: Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance

The synthetic GpuTest results showed the Intel Windows driver to be significantly faster than the current open-source Skylake graphics driver with Mesa 11.1-devel and Linux 4.3.

There's also some tests that the Intel Windows driver can run where as the Linux driver cannot. On Linux, the Intel driver continues to be limited to OpenGL 3.3 support although they should have OpenGL ~4.2 release hopefully by the next Mesa release at year's end. Under Windows, the Core i5 6600K had OpenGL 4.4 support along with OpenCL 2.0 (the Beignet open-source OpenCL driver is limited to OpenCL 1.2 while work is underway on CL 2.0 enablement).

These results show that at least For Skylake, the Windows OpenGL driver remains much faster than the open-source Linux driver, along with being more featureful. Stay tuned for the AMD and NVIDIA Windows vs. Linux OpenGL benchmark results in articles coming up over the next few days.