Ubuntu 14.10 XMir System Compositor Benchmarks
With Ubuntu 14.10 "Utopic Unicorn" due for release today, here's some benchmarks showing how the standard Unity 7 desktop on Ubuntu 14.10 is comparing to the still-experimental Unity System Compositor and using XMir for running traditional Linux OpenGL games.
From a standard Intel Core i7 Haswell system with HD Graphics I ran benchmarks with the development snapshot of Ubuntu Utopic as of yesterday to see how well the stock Unity 7.3.1 environment is comparing to when it's run with unity-system-compositor installed and using Mir support with XMir for running a variety of standard OpenGL benchmarks as well as some 2D X11 benchmarks.
Canonical's Mir stack isn't replacing the X.Org Server by default on Ubuntu desktop versions until Ubuntu 16.04, but potentially Ubuntu 15.10 while up to this point it's an experimental option that can be easily installed by early adopters and enthusiasts through the Ubuntu package archive. This article isn't about benchmarking any experimental Ubuntu-Desktop-Next / Unity 8 code.
The Haswell system used for this testing was the CompuLab Intense-PC2 with Core i7-4600U, 8GB of RAM, and 120GB Micron SSD. Ubuntu 14.10 was equipped with the Linux 3.16 kernel, Unity 7.3.1., X.Org Server 1.16.0, xf86-video-intel 2.99.914, Mesa 10.3.0, and GCC 4.9.1 all atop an EXT4 file-system.
The 2D and 3D benchmarks of Ubuntu 14.10 were carried out via the open-source and fully-automated Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.