In our benchmarks of Microsoft Windows 8, we have found that Intel’s Windows OpenGL driver is generally superior to that of their open-source Linux graphics driver. Some progress has been made, but in today’s testing of an ASUS Ultrabook bearing an Ivy Bridge processor, Linux has a ways to go for some games in matching [...]

To complement the Ubuntu 13.04 benchmarks already delivered, including Microsoft Windows 7 and Windows 8 benchmarks, here are tests of Apple’s OS X 10.8.3 operating system on a MacBook Pro compared to Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS, Ubuntu 12.10, and the latest Ubuntu 13.04 (post Beta 2) state. Ubuntu 13.04 is generally competitive with OS X 10.8 [...]

For those that may be currently running Ubuntu 12.04.2 as the latest Ubuntu Linux Long-Term Support release but are considering upgrading to Ubuntu 13.04 for better performance, here are benchmarks comparing the two Ubuntu Linux releases when tested on an Apple MacBook Pro and Lenovo ThinkPad. Overall, there’s a few areas where the new Ubuntu [...]

After spending the better part of the past week running continuous open-source Linux benchmarks on the Exynos5-powered Google Nexus 10, the first extensive benchmark results for the Nexus 10 tablet running the Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview are now available.

On Friday benchmarks were delivered of the Atom-based NVIDIA ION platform with the Nouveau driver against NVIDIA’s binary blob. Those results were favorable towards the reverse-engineered, open-source NVIDIA driver.

For your viewing pleasure today are benchmarks of the DragonFlyBSD, Ubuntu, CentOS, Oracle Solaris Express, and OpenIndiana operating systems.

With Linux 4 Tegra R16 now having an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (hardfp) sample file-system and the R16 drivers supporting ARM hard floating-point as the preferred format over softfp, new Tegra 3 “Cardhu” tablet benchmarks were carried out to look at the performance between L4T R16 + Ubuntu 12.04 vs. L4T R15 + Ubuntu 11.04.

At the beginning of this month there was the release of DragonFlyBSD 3.2.1 that claimed a battle for speed against Linux with major improvements for the multi-threaded application performance against Linux. PostgreSQL was the only benchmark cited by the DragonFly camp with the new performance results, so a couple Phoronix tests were carried out.

For kicking off a new week of Linux benchmarks, here are some results of a high-end Intel Extreme Edition workstation when comparing the bare metal host and KVM virtualization performance between Ubuntu 12.10 and the earlier Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS release and then the RHEL-based CentOS 6.3.

For those wondering about the performance of Ubuntu Linux 12.10 versus Microsoft Windows 7 when using the same system and the Catalyst graphics driver, here are new Phoronix benchmarks of an AMD Radeon HD 6870 graphics card

Continuing on from last week’s initial benchmarks of the AMD A10-5800K Trinity APU on Linux, the Trinity memory performance testing, and then more benchmarks of the Radeon HD 7660D integrated graphics, here is the large Ubuntu Linux comparison of the AMD A10-5800K compared to the previous-generation AMD A8 Llano APU, an AMD FX-Series Bulldozer, and [...]

Continuing on from last week’s initial benchmarks of the AMD A10-5800K Trinity APU on Linux, the Trinity memory performance testing, and then more benchmarks of the Radeon HD 7660D integrated graphics, here is the large Ubuntu Linux comparison of the AMD A10-5800K compared to the previous-generation AMD A8 Llano APU

When Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal” is officially released there will be more Ubuntu 12.10 performance figures to publish beyond what’s already been benchmarked. In this article are a preview of some Intel performance figures comparing an updated Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS installation to Ubuntu 12.10 with its near-final packages as of this week.

Intel has made lots of open-source Linux driver advancements for this latest Intel hardware — while simultaneously working on next-generation Haswell and Valley View support — but how is their support standing for much older hardware? In this article are benchmarks from an Intel Atom with GMA3150 integrated graphics.

Since Apple released OX X 10.8 “Mountain Lion” last month, there have been tests going on at Phoronix of this latest Apple operating system not only on the Retina MacBook Pro, but other Mac hardware as well. In this article is a comparison of OS X 10.8 versus Ubuntu Linux — when trying out both [...]

Following yesterday’s news that Ubuntu 12.10 will drop the Unity 2D desktop, I carried out some quick tests comparing the latest state of the Unity desktop with Compiz against the lightweight Unity 2D desktop that’s now being removed. To not much surprise, the composited Unity desktop still has some performance shortcomings for OpenGL workloads compared [...]

With the advent of Steam landing on Linux drawing closer, Windows vs. Linux comparisons will become an inevitability. Although Valve’s effort to port Steam over to Linux fans is still a work in progress, some onlookers may be surprised at the results thus far: Left 4 Dead 2 runs up to 20 percent faster in [...]

At the request of many Phoronix readers following the release of updated Arch Linux media, here are some new Arch Linux benchmarks. However, this is not just Arch vs. Ubuntu, but rather a larger Linux distribution performance comparison. In this article are benchmark results from Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, CentOS 6.2, Fedora 17, Slackware 14.0 Beta, [...]

In this article is a plethora of benchmarks when the 11 different compiler configurations were used to build a set of test profiles via the Phoronix Test Suite and the performance of the resulting binaries were measured. The CCFLAGS/CXFLAGS were set to -O3 and -march=corei7-avx. The corei7-avx-i march option wasn’t used since not all of [...]

Here’s a comparison of the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS versus Microsoft Windows 7 performance when it comes to using Intel Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processors with integrated graphics. While the Sandy Bridge graphics performance was once faster when it came to OpenGL with the open-source Linux driver, that’s no longer the case.

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin” can boot faster… sometimes. If you are not lucky, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS can boot more than twice as slow as Ubuntu 10.04, the previous LTS release. Here are boot performance results of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS running on six distinct notebooks and comparing the Bootchart results upon clean installations of Ubuntu [...]

When it comes to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on older x86 PC hardware, it’s another step backwards. For hardware older than about a half-decade, Ubuntu 12.04 is becoming more sluggish to use, burning through greater power, and really not being worthwhile to pursue the upgrade. The Linux support for this older hardware has passed its prime.

One of the great advantages of Linux is it has great support for older systems and legacy hardware. This week, we take a look at how Ubuntu 12.04 ‘Precise Pangolin’ runs on an older system running older hardware. I found such a system in my very own office.

Microsoft Windows may be the de facto standard desktop operating system in business environments, but high costs, restrictive licences and constant security issues are leading an increasing number of companies to consider open source alternatives — as Kat Orphanides explains.

After delivering benchmarks last week that were comparing the Intel Sandy Bridge performance of Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” vs. Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot” when it came to the Sandy Bridge OpenGL graphics performance, here’s a comparative look at the performance of Ubuntu 11.10 against Mac OS X 10.7.2 from the Intel Sandy Bridge-based Mac.

In this first proper round of AMD FX-8150 Linux testing, the performance of the octal-core Bulldozer is being compared to the remote results of the AMD FX-4100 system and then the other hardware that was used for comparison (namely Intel’s Sandy Bridge) and other test hardware at Phoronix

The AMD Radeon HD 6450 is the lowest-end offering in this family, but how’s its performance relative to other low-end AMD and NVIDIA parts? In this review we have a PowerColor Radeon HD 6450 1GB and are seeing how well this graphics card works under Ubuntu Linux.

Last week we delivered results looking at the power consumption of Ubuntu 11.04 versus Windows 7, which was interesting in its own right, but in this article is a brief look at where Apple’s Mac OS X operating system fits in between the power consumption of Ubuntu Linux and Microsoft Windows

Now that we have looked at the Ubuntu power consumption going back as far as Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (and found serious power regressions), the next round of testing is providing the Bootchart results for five different systems also going back as far as Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.

Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal” is set to be released on Thursday and while there are a number of new features to talk about in this latest release, the Phoronix Test Suite software has been busy analyzing the performance of this latest release.