The performance is much more dependent on the chosen database engine for MariaDB or MySQL.
MariaDB provides support for a faster write cache enabled engine called "Aria" compared to the default MyISAM Engine of MySQL.
Aria is usually faster for temporary tables when compared to MyISAM because Aria caches row data in memory and normally doesn't have to write the temporary rows to disk.
Another enhanced area is the way of fetching a view. MariaDB usesTableElimination, but I'm not sure if MySQL uses that at all (I never found that mentioned anywhere!).
In addition to MariaDB, the same Table elimination is found in both Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008 and Oracle 11g.