Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu + Linux 4.7 + Mesa 12.1 Intel OpenGL Tests

With Microsoft having recently released the Windows 10 Anniversary update I've been running some fresh Windows vs. Linux performance comparisons. The first of these comparisons for your viewing pleasure is looking at the latest Windows 10 build with the latest Intel driver compared to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS while also comparing the performance when manually upgrading to the Linux 4.7 kernel and Mesa 12.1-dev for delivering the latest OpenGL performance potential.

The same Core i5 6600K "Skylake" system with Intel HD Graphics 530 was used for testing both under Windows and Ubuntu Linux. The Windows 10 Pro x64 Anniversary Update with all other available system updates as of 6 August was used for testing. The latest 20.19.15.4463 driver was used as of testing time. The Intel Windows driver currently exposes OpenGL 4.4 and OpenCL 2.0 (along with DirectX 12.0).

Under Ubuntu 16.04 LTS first the same OpenGL game tests were run with the default stack: Linux 4.4 and Mesa 11.2. Following that the system was manually upgraded to the Linux 4.7.0 mainline kernel and Mesa 12.1-dev Git as of 7 August from the Oibaf PPA. With Mesa 12.1 Git, the Intel driver is finally exposing OpenGL 4.4 for Broadwell and newer while they are quite close to OpenGL 4.5 once finishing up some conformance issues. Under OpenCL, via Beignet they currently have OpenCL 1.2 support for Intel on Linux while there is a branch containing OpenCL 2.0 support but it doesn't appear that it will be in released form anytime soon.

All of the benchmarks under Windows 10 and Ubuntu Linux were carried out in a fully-automated manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. Additionally, at the end of the article are some additional Windows vs. Linux gaming benchmarks that were run manually for there not being full and appropriate automation support within those games like F1 2015, Shadow of Mordor, and Tomb Raider.