performance tests conducted on 7.04, 7.10, 8.04, 8.10rc

[Bryce Harrington]

On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 12:44:07PM +0100, Mirco M?ller wrote:
> Greetings everybody!
> 
> 	Phoronix ran performance tests on releases 7.04, 7.10, 8.04 and 8.10rc.
> 8.10 seems to be the worst performer of the quartet. Have a look at
> their summarizing article:
> 
>         http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_bench_2008&num=1
> 
> 	They are trying to be fair and point out possible causes for the
> slowdowns. While this has only been tested on a ThinkPad T60 their
> initial findings are nothing to write home about. Most influential are
> crucial parts like the kernel, gcc, Xorg, graphics-drivers.
> 
> Time for alarm-bells to go off?

For the Xorg tests, note the heap of caveats they give on page 9.

For the Gaming tests, if I understand correctly, they downloaded and
installed the latest -fglrx on each Ubuntu version rather than use the
one that shipped with it.  Unsurprisingly, the performance numbers were
essentially identical across the board.


For GtkPerf measurements, they also point out that,

  When switching to Ubuntu 8.10, however, the performance had dropped by
  more than 20%. This could be attributed to the binary-only ATI driver
  with X Server 1.5 / X.Org 7.4.

A caveat should be added that AMD was behind the curve in getting Xorg
1.5 support, so had to pull out all the stops to get this to Ubuntu.
One or two performance regressions wouldn't be surprising, nor really a
cause for concern.


I wish they'd done tests across more than one video driver.  As it is,
all these tests are really only for fglrx.

Bryce