Ubuntu 13.04 Desktop Comparison: 6 Desktops, 5 Driver/GPU Combinations

With Warsow we are back to another more visually rich game where the open-source drivers (Radeon, Intel, and Nouveau) are under pressure and see little change between the desktop environments. For the binary AMD and NVIDIA drivers, the LXDE 0.5.11 desktop environment was performing the best.

Lastly, for the Xonotic first person shooter on the high-performance proprietary NVIDIA and AMD Catalyst drivers there is little change in performance between the six desktop environments. For the open-source Mesa/Gallium3D drivers, the Unity, GNOME Classic, Xfce, and LXDE desktop environments were running at about the same speed. The stragglers with the visually rich Xonotic game were GNOME Shell and KDE Plasma.