Intel Graphics Regressions In Ubuntu 9.04?
Switching to the newer unstable version of Ubuntu had actually led to the frame-rate in OpenArena more than doubling. This game, which is powered by the open-source ioquake3 engine, has undergone a significant performance boost with Mesa 7.3 and the other updated packages. With around a frame-rate of 13 FPS on the Intrepid Ibex, this game would barely be playable, but with the Jaunty Jackalope it should be fairly playable using Intel GMA 4500 series graphics.
While the OpenGL-driven OpenArena witnessed a large performance boost with Ubuntu 9.04, the OpenGL performance with QGears2 experienced a large performance drop. The gears test using the OpenGL engine had dropped from nearly 70 FPS to just under 30 FPS when switching to these new X.Org packages.
The test that consists of drawing text with OpenGL for QGears2 also experienced a striking loss. The frame-rate was more than halved when upgrading to the packages that are just months newer.