In the first showdown that Phoronix tried, the Linux driver for Intel’s HD3000 iGPU beat out the Win7 driver handily.  That win was due to the OSTC Linux engineers at Intel doing a bang up job on the Linux drivers, while the Windows team lagged behind a bit.  A few months have passed and the laggards on the Windows team have since released a major update to their drivers, necessitating Phoronix to repeat the test.  Unfortunately for them the Linux team has also released improvements, specifically "Sandy Bridge New Acceleration".  Can the Windows team retake the lead, or should you switch to OpenGL games on Linux? Read on to see.

"The new benchmarks going out today on Phoronix are looking at the performance of Intel’s Sandy Bridge graphics with the latest Microsoft Windows 7 and Ubuntu Linux drivers. Not only are we using the very latest drivers, but there is also a separate Linux test run with SNA, the "Sandy Bridge New Acceleration" architecture enabled."

Here are some more Processor articles from around the web:

Processors