Intel Skylake Graphics: Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 8 November 2015 at 02:40 PM EST. Page 1 of 4. 34 Comments.

As it's been a while since my last Windows vs. Linux graphics comparison and haven't yet done such a comparison for Intel's latest-generation Skylake HD Graphics, the past few days I was running Windows 10 Pro x64 versus Ubuntu 15.10 graphics benchmarks with a Core i5 6600K sporting HD Graphics 530.

This article is an OpenGL performance comparison between Windows 10 Pro x64 and Ubuntu 15.10 when upgrading to the very latest open-source graphics driver stack. Atop Ubuntu 15.10 was the upgrade to the Linux 4.3.0 stable kernel and also switching to Mesa 11.1-devel Git using the Padoka PPA. On the Windows side, the latest Intel 20.19.15.4300 graphics driver was used for benchmarking this Skylake system.

The same Skylake system was used for testing under Windows and Linux: an Intel Core i5 6600K CPU with HD Graphics 530, 256GB Transcend SSD, 16GB of DDR4 system memory, and MSI Z170A GAMING PRO motherboard. The OpenGL tests used for this comparison were ones known of be of similar quality under both Windows and Linux, for more details see the notice earlier this week about test selection.

All of the benchmarks were carried out in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.


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