Is fedora slower than other distros using Intel graphics?

I noticed an odd thing when I was trying out Fedora 19 on my laptop, which was that graphical performance seemed to be running much slower than on a distro like Ubuntu. For instance, I was trying out Ubuntu 13.04 with Minecraft and I noticed that it was a lot faster. I confirmed this by putting Fedora on an external drive and testing it that way.

If anyone's willing to experiment, here's what I did:

I went into Minecraft and changed the Graphics setting to Fast and the Render distance to Normal.

I then went to generate a new world. I set the seed to 9876534321 (this puts you in an area with lots of trees) and turned off the generation of structures. Once it loaded, I pressed F3 to bring up the FPS counter and roamed around. Here's what I saw.

With Fedora, looking around at the forest generated around 35-40 FPS. Looking at more complex areas (such as bodies of water next to a hill) dropped the FPS down to 25. But with Ubuntu, the FPS were around 60 with the lowest parts being at 50 looking at the same map.

This is the hardware specification (I'm using the i5 model): http://www.asus.com/Notebooks_Ultrab...specifications

For Fedora, I used KDE with the desktop effects off. With Ubuntu, I used Unity, which has effects enabled.

I know Minecraft isn't the most hardware efficient, but a 40-50% drop seems a bit severe for a regression. Any thoughts on why this is happening?