Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 21st May 2008 08:05 UTC, submitted by Mohammed Saleh
Benchmarks Several open source applications are available on both Linux as well as Windows. This gave Mohammed Saleh the idea of comparing the performance of various of these applications on both Ubuntu 8.04 as well as Windows XP SP3, to see which of the two performed better with certain applications. The results were rather interesting.
Permalink for comment 315142
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
kaiwai
Member since:
2005-07-06

Users of OpenGL (eg. Blender etc) may be interested in the very recent article comparing driver performance between Linux and Windows using the ATI driver 8.47.3.

Summary: Linux comes out on top on more of the benchmarks. Very well done AMD to turning things around!
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_firegl_v...

Note that Ubuntu 8.04 uses fglrx driver version 8.47.3. I noticed that on my HP nw8240 laptop with a FireGL V5000 Mobility (essentially an X700) the frame rate in GLgears went from 1400 to 4030. Plus the rate is the same whether logged in as an ordinary user or as root (it used to be faster when running as root). Wow!

My machine with an Nvidia 8800GTX always ran quick under Linux.

If you are on a ATI card and Blender runs slow, don't whinge here - it just shows you haven't configured your workstation properly (duh!). Do a simple check by running 'glxinfo' and ensure it contains an output line with "direct rendering: yes". If it doesn't then figure out how to get OpenGL running in hardware, since you are running in software.

I'm happy to help you out with this if you want (just reply to this message, and all can see what needs to be done).


That has always been the case with X11 - there are people here on osnews.com who like to perpetuate the urban myth that X11 is a performance liability. The only evidence to prove such a preposterous assumption is "windows tear" - ignoring the fact that tearing is a by-product of synchronisation and buffering issues rather than it having anything to do with 'performance' - performance being throughput. Heck, I remember back when I used to frequent COLA (comp.os.linux.advocacy), there used to be frequent displays even back in the XFree86 days of, when X11 was benchmarked, it outperformed Windows without any specialised tweaking involved.

I'm running Solaris SXCE with an Nvidia Quadro 570 FX (Mobile) with the latest drivers, and the responsiveness and snappiness is far higher than what I experienced when running Windows Vista Basic (which was the preloaded version on this lenovo thinkpad). With GNOME 2.22.1 installed (Vermillion B91), the stability, speed and snappiness is even better than before. Hence, I find it incredibly funny when I hear people go on about how great Windows is, and yet, if one were to use the metric of improvement of products on the same hardware - each release for Microsoft is a further regression.

Reply Parent Score: 3