NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN: Windows 8.1 vs. Ubuntu 13.10 Linux

The results in this article to be shared include a Windows 8.1 vs. Ubuntu Linux 13.10 comparison for the GTX TITAN, a 14-way comparison of AMD/NVIDIA graphics cards on Ubuntu to look at the GTX TITAN OpenCL and OpenGL performance (results also shared from the GTX 780 Ti review), and then the performance-per-Watt and thermal results. First up in this review are the results when looking at the NVIDIA performance between Windows 8 and Linux.

The system used for this cross-platform testing was an AMD FX-8350 Vishera system overclocked to 4.5GHz. The system used for the other testing was a Core i7 4770K "Haswell" and those system details are shared later in the article. The latest NVIDIA Linux driver at the time of benchmarking was 331.20 while the Windows 8 NVIDIA driver was 331.82. The same hardware components were used when testing Windows 8.1 x64 Pro (with all available updates) to Ubuntu 13.10 with the Xfce desktop. (Pardon the Phoronix Test Suite's Phodevi library not having as good hardware/software information reporting under Microsoft Windows as it does with Linux, due to lack of available public and standardized driver interfaces.)

Both operating systems were left with their stock settings/options. Benchmarking on both operating systems was handled identically and in a fully automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite. The selection of OpenGL benchmarks used for this Windows 8.1 vs. Ubuntu Linux 13.10 testing was limited to games/benchmarks that are known to have comparable quality ports on both Windows and Linux.