Gentoo is a source based distribution which lets the user decide how to optimize their system in many ways. Linux Magazine benchmarks three of the most common GCC optimizations; -Os, -O2 and -O3, and throws in Ubuntu for good measure.
Compilation
Compiling applications is something you rarely have to do on a binary system, but it’s obviously commonplace on a source based distro!
Naturally the systems with less optimization for the compiler to do takes less time.
Gaming
When it comes to gaming, everyone wants higher frame rates. These systems were all using NVIDIA’s proprietary video driver, and some of the games such as ut2004 were pre-compiled binaries.
There’s not much difference to be seen here between the GCC optimized systems, although the Gentoo system did generally perform better than Ubuntu.
Graphics
When it comes to graphics, the arena is fairly broad. First up is manipulation of images.
In these tests -O3 is generally the most efficient, however the “resizing” results show -Os with its smaller memory footprint coming out on top. Once again there is not a whole lot of difference between them, however Ubuntu is consistently in last place.
Next in Graphics is ray tracing.
The standout result here is -Os in the POV-Ray test, which was almost one and a half times faster than its nearest rival.
Next it’s benchmarking GTK operations with GtkPerf.
Ubuntu was the clear loser in these tests, with -O3 out performing all contenders.
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