Intel Iris Pro 5200: Windows 8 vs. Ubuntu Linux Redux

Earlier this month I published benchmarks of Intel's Iris Pro 5200 graphics when comparing the Intel driver performance between Windows 8 and Ubuntu Linux. The test results found that there were some performance wins for Intel OpenGL on Linux after the very latest open-source driver optimizations were made, but there are still some losses. In this article are a few more Windows 8 vs. Linux benchmark results for the Haswell Ultrabook with Iris Pro graphics.

Today's benchmarks aren't fundamentally different from the earlier Windows 8 vs. Ubuntu tests on the System76 Galago UltraPro, but rather complementary and run some of the tests at different resolutions, etc. The software versions used were the same with Microsoft Windows 8 Pro x64 and all available software updates at the time of testing. The Intel Windows driver used during testing was the Iris/HD 15.31.17.3257 driver that was released on 11 September to succeed the original Haswell Windows driver from mid-May.

On the Linux side we benchmarked Ubuntu 13.10 with the Linux 3.11 stable kernel, Xfce 4.10, xf86-video-intel 2.21.14, and Mesa 9.2.0. This driver stack represents a modern stable experience with the Linux 3.11 kernel and Mesa 9.2 and will be the experience found by default in next month's Ubuntu 13.10 release.

All benchmarking was handled in a fully automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking platform. The System76 Galago UltraPro that was used for all of the Iris Pro testing is loaded with an Intel Core i7 4750HQ CPU, 8GB of system memory, and 120GB Intel SSD. This testing is quite straightforward and complementary to our earlier Iris Pro multi-platform benchmarking article, so let's get straight to the new data.