For the past few days at Phoronix we have begun looking extensively at the Intel Iris Pro 5200 graphics under Linux, since receiving the System76 Galago UltraPro. The Iris Pro 5200 are the new high-end Intel Haswell graphics that have 128MB of embedded video RAM on the die, which should yield a nice performance boost when properly implemented within the Intel Linux driver. Already our testing has found the Iris Pro performance on Linux has doubled with open-source driver improvements since Haswell's launch. Now we're out today with our first Intel Iris Pro OpenGL gaming benchmarks between Ubuntu Linux and Microsoft Windows 8 for this Intel Core i7 Ultrabook.

The most recent Linux vs. Windows benchmarks done at Phoronix for Intel Haswell hardware was done at the end of July when the results were still rather mixed. The Intel Windows OpenGL driver still tended to be faster than the open-source Linux driver. The Windows driver is also more feature-rich in supporting OpenCL and OpenGL 4.0 while the Linux driver isn't yet to feature parity with all of the hardware's capability, only handles OpenGL ~3.2 at the moment, and there's only an experimental OpenCL implementation. As another example, even OpenGL debugging is worse with Linux than Windows.