Windows 8.1 vs. Ubuntu 14.10 With Intel HD Graphics

With GpuTest's synthetic OpenGL workloads, Plot3D was faster under Windows 8.1 Pro but the Linux driver is caching up. Linux 3.17 + Mesa 10.4 improved the speed by 37% over Linux 3.16 + Mesa 10.3 on Ubuntu 14.10, but Windows 8.1 with the latest Intel Windows OpenGL driver was still leading.

With the Furmark benchmark, the Windows driver was leading by more than 50%.

For the very basic triangle benchmark, when using the very newest Intel open-source driver code -- beyond what Ubuntu 14.10 shipped -- the results are now competitive between Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu Linux.

Overall these results show that the latest open-source Intel Linux OpenGL driver is becoming quite competitive with the closed-source Intel Windows driver, but there's still a few areas where the Windows code reigns supreme. At least the Intel Linux support continues to be improved for Haswell while most of the Intel OTC developers are now focused on Broadwell, Skylake, and Cherry View support. Hopefully not too far out we'll finally see the Intel Linux driver provide very adequate support for OpenCL via Beignet, OpenGL 4.x, and support for other Intel graphics features currently only exposed by their Windows display driver.