Ubuntu 10.04 LTS: Lucid Lynx Benchmarked And Reviewed

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Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, is pinning its hopes of OEM acceptance on the Lucid Lynx. We've put the screws to this new Long Term Support (LTS) release, comparing it to Canonical's previous LTS release, 8.04 Hardy Heron, to look for progress.

Benchmark Results: Tropics, Sanctuary, And Lightsmark

After the unexpected findings in Heaven, we re-ran all of the graphics-intensive benchmarks under Lucid with desktop effects disabled. We left the 195.36.15 Nvidia driver installed, since the upgrade to 195.36.24 proved marginal. Manually installing the latest Nvidia driver is also a major pain, and not something easily accomplished for someone new to Linux. Disabling Desktop Effects (DE), on the other hand, is as simple as changing the desktop wallpaper or theme.

UNiGiNE Tropics

UNiGiNE Tropics was run with full 16x anisotropy at a resolution of 1280x1024.

Ubuntu 10.04 gets eviscerated by 8.04 to the tune of 20 FPS. That gap was all but closed when Lucid ran with desktop effects disabled. Essentially, Tropics is a draw when you look at apples to apples.

UNiGiNE Sanctuary

Sanctuary was run with full 16x anisotropy at a resolution of 1280x1024.

Lucid is again owned by the older LTS release. But again, the difference was minimized when desktop effects were disabled, leaving Hardy with a three FPS lead.

Lightsmark 2008

This one is puzzling. Hardy still kills Lucid, even with desktop effects disabled.

89 Comments Comment from the forums
  • My Logitech Wireless Wave keyboard and mouse didn't work with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Desktop x64 on VMWare Workstation 7.01. It works in the beginning with text screen, but once it goes to GUI screen keyboard function is lost. ;_;
    Reply
  • WheelsOfConfusion
    There's lots of talk on the Phoronix forums about how Ubuntu + nVidia binaries don't play nicely, while some other distros don't have that problem. This was reflected in an Ubuntu vs. Arch bench-off: surprisingly, Arch only really thrashed Ubuntu in the games and everything else was about even. This might be behind those pitiful scores with the game benchmarks.
    Compiz also has a measurable, negative effect on game benches with nVidia, but not so much with ATI hardware/drivers. I'm not surprised that turning off desktop effects changed the game so much.

    What do you think is going on with 7zip, an ext4 issue?
    Reply
  • jsowoc
    With 10.10 planning btrfs and GnomeShell, it's a sure recepie for tragedy :-). Very nice article.
    Reply
  • adamovera
    @WheelsOfConfusion:
    RE: desktop effects - I'll be adding an ATI card to the mix a little earlier than I had intended in order to look at the desktop effects issue. Stay tuned.
    RE: Gaming FPS - The interesting thing is that the actual games didn't have that big of an impact from desktop effects. It was the unigine benchmarks that showed seriously significant drops in frame rates with them enabled.
    RE: 7z - I suppose it could be EXT4, but I believe EXT4 is the reason for the speed gains in all other comp/decomp tests, as well as the copy time tests. Comprehensive filesystem and archiving benchmarks under the same release should tell us whether or not it's an EXT4 issue.
    Reply
  • apoq
    Why no benchmark against Windows. You yourself said Ubuntu should be aiming to convert Windows users more than Mac users (and I whole heartedly agree with you). I love Ubuntu and I use most of the time, but every time I boot into Windows (7) I am left with the feeling of a way snappier OS. I think this is where Ubuntu is really lacking.
    Reply
  • killerclick
    Linux still doesn't have the software I need so I can't use it. However I've noticed a sharp decrease in stupid problems in the past three years (prolly thanks to Ubuntu). Currently my favorite distro is Mint but I remain a Windows user mainly because of a lot of software I own and am proficient in.
    As for the latest Ubuntu, why can't they have a bland business-like theme? Are the Phoenix Suns now paying them to use their colors?
    Reply
  • For your Skype visibility issues, go to Skype settings and change theme to GTK+. Did the trick for me.
    Reply
  • samspqr
    looks nice, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions, like:
    * will it play 1080p24 H.264 videos smoothly, with GPU acceleration?
    * will it play vimeo/youtube high-res videos smoothly?
    given how good you say it is on the other fronts, I'll give it a try and see for myself (I'm currently on 8.04, so convincing me to spend an afternoon updating my systems is no small feat)
    Reply
  • zybch
    So, will this year be another "Year of Linux on the Desktop" like its been claiming for the past decade year in year out? Or will it remain a niche OS which people needing to do actual work on 'real' programs can continue to dismiss out of hand?
    Reply
  • flightmare
    You can set the minimize, close and maximize buttons to the right again in gconf-editor. Browse to apps/metacity/general and edit button_layout to your likings.
    Reply