Ubuntu 10.10: Maverick Meerkat Benchmarked And Reviewed

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Benchmark Results: Unigine

We finally nailed down the Unigine benchmark settings in our last review, but as it usually does, stuff happens. We didn't foresee the switch from an Nvidia graphics card in our previous Athlon 64 X2 test system to an AMD card in our new Core i5 rig, causing turmoil.

Even with the new test system being a hands-down gain in the hardware department, graphics performance in Linux has traditionally been more reliable with Nvidia cards than even comparable solutions from AMD. As a result, some of our benchmark settings are actually lower than those found in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS: Lucid Lynx Benchmarked And Reviewed, despite this much more modern test platform.

The preferred resolution of the 64-bit test system's monitor is 1280x1024. Before running any of the graphics benchmarks at 1600x1200, we set the desktop resolution to 1600x1200 via Catalyst Control Center (Administrative) in the System/Preferences menu. Running any of theses benchmarks at a resolution above that of the Ubuntu desktop can result in up to a 30% reduction in frame rates.

Unigine Sanctuary

Ubuntu 10.10 holds a single frame per second lead over 10.04 LTS in Sanctuary at both 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 with the highest possible detail settings.

Unigine Tropics

Maverick Meerkat manages a mere fraction of a frame more per second than Lucid Lynx in Tropics at 1280x1024 with full detail settings. At 1600x1200 with 4x anti-aliasing, Ubuntu 10.10 again squeezes past 10.04 LTS, this time by only a tenth of a frame per second.

Unigine Heaven

We could not enable any anti-aliasing at 1280x1024 or higher in Unigine Heaven. We didn't run at lower resolutions, since anything lower isn't very useful. We also had to leave replication and tessellation disabled (the default).

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS comes out half of a frame per second ahead of the newer 10.10 in Unigine Heaven.

Overall, the Unigine benchmarks give the newer release a slight advantage with the notable exception of Heaven, the latest benchmark. However, the difference in scores are all well within 1.1 FPS.

Adam Overa
66 Comments Comment from the forums
  • "With the appearance of Windows 7 on slate devices in perpetual limbo"

    http://www.dailytech.com/HP+Slate+Powered+by+Windows+7+Launches+at+799+is+Business+up+Front/article19953.htm

    http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF06a/321957-321957-64295-3841267-3955550-4332585.html

    How is that Limbo? You can buy one right now.
    Reply
  • adamovera
    I didn't know they were taking pre-orders yet, though HP Slate doesn't ship until the middle of November. Unfortunately, the HP Slate looks like a really half-hearted attempt. Business product? That pretty much means not to get your hopes up. It should have been out much closer to the iPad, but got pushed back repeatedly. Ever since they bought Palm it seems like their Windows efforts in this form factor will take a backseat until they try to make WebOS work - can't blame them really, WebOS is pretty slick and they paid a lot for it. But I still do want to get my hands on the Slate, but look forward to seeing what they do with WebOS more now.
    Reply
  • arkadi
    If we "put all the issues aside", i love allot of things.....Don't get me wrong, i love to play with Linux at home, but at the moment I prefer to use it at work, in the server room ware it belongs (at the moment). Using it at home it just to much of an effort, to many issues, hardware compatibility etc...Hopefully one day...
    Any way Ubuntu came a long way to make it happen....But still few days ago i tried it and few others on a net book, with via chip set and CPU with no luck...
    Reply
  • TomSah
    "Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition is also a mess. As a netbook operating system intended for actual people to use in a production environment, I have to say that UNE 10.10 should be avoided. From our experience on the Dell Mini 10v, UNE Meerkat is in no way ready for general consumption. Its many bugs and poor performance are just not acceptable or at all realistic for the average end-user. Loading almost anything on UNE 10.10 was clearly sluggish"

    Wow. Im running 32-bit Maverick UNE on my Asus eee 1000HA and i have to say that i fell in love as soon as it installed! As soon as i disabled the unity interface to get the desktop interface I was away laughing! I havnt had any of the problems you mention, app startup has been great, no crashes/bugs - And this is my first serious attempt at using a Linux distro. I had a lot of fun tweaking everything to my liking and i now feel like I have the perfect OS for me. Its really strange you had bad experiences like that, must be the dell mini haha.
    Reply
  • adamovera
    TomSah:
    As soon as i disabled the unity interface to get the desktop interface I was away laughing!
    Well there you go, you got rid of Unity. I don't doubt it works fine now, LOL. I'm using the 10v with 10.10 32-bit Desktop Edition right now and it's absolutely fantastic, one of the best OSes on this thing by far. The track pad is a nightmare, and there's no fixing that, but in 10.10 it's much better than earlier versions. Tap to click is the best in Windows 7, but drag and drop in Ubuntu is much less maddening than Win7.
    Reply
  • pinkfloydminnesota
    How come you don't compare the benchmarks to Windows?
    Reply
  • randomizer
    Just moving the cursor up and down the launcher shows how slow Unity is. The delay between when the cursor moves over an application to when the application's name pops up gives the impression of playing a game at very low framerates.

    The Ubuntu font looks ok but it's really only usable in menus and window titles (which I think is all it is used for, fortunately). There's no way such a stylised font could be readable for long periods in a document.

    Adam, you should see if any updates fixed the consistently inconsistent HDD to HDD file copy performance.

    9503393 said:
    How come you don't compare the benchmarks to Windows?

    Because Windows is not a Linux distro, and this review is for a Linux distro?
    Reply
  • adamovera
    randomizer:
    Adam, you should see if any updates fixed the consistently inconsistent HDD to HDD file copy performance.
    As of 10/22/10, when I re-tested the HDD to USB times, they had not.

    pinkfloydminnesotaHow come you don't compare the benchmarks to Windows?Workin' on it, stayed tuned. But randomizer is right, this is a review of the new Ubuntu release. As a review of the new version of a software product, this type of article isn't the appropriate forum for that comparison.
    Reply
  • 64 bit vs. 32 bit? 32 seems much better all round, stability, compatibility etc.. Is there that much speed difference to be worth using 64 bit?
    gvnmcknz
    Reply
  • dEAne
    I guess there are lots of things to do to make it good.
    Reply