Linked by Jordan Spencer Cunningham on Wed 13th May 2009 01:18 UTC
Phoronix, known for their various speed tests and reviews, compared the latest in Ubuntu and what, until recently, used to be the lastest in Mac OS X with 29 different benchmarking tests. Some of the results were rather interesting.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
The main issue with the FPS test in Urban Terror is the difference in OpenGL versions. As stated, Ubuntu was using v1.4, while OSX was only using 1.2. Most games, especially ones as optimized as ioquake3 (the engine that drives Urban Terror), will use different render paths for different versions of OpenGL. Most likely, ioquake3 saw OSX was using an older version and turned off some of the features. In Ubuntu, the newer version triggered the newer features, which on Intel graphics is done via software since the Intel GPU hardly does anything in hardware.
So the difference wasn't so much optimized Apple drivers vs unoptimized linux drivers as it was old rendering path with more hardware acceleration vs newer rendering path using software. I'd bet that if they redid the test with UT set to the lowest values for the rendering quality, both would show nearly the same FPS values.