NVIDIA On Ubuntu 14.04 Has Some New Advantages Over Windows 8.1

While Nexuiz is a now defunct open-source game, it's been used for many years at Phoronix as an interesting, cross-platform OpenGL test case. In the past the Nexuiz performance under Linux and Windows with the binary NVIDIA/AMD drivers has resulted in nearly the same frame-rates, but with this latest NVIDIA 337 series driver testing of Windows 8.1 Update against Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, the Linux OS has the advantages. Aside from the GeForce 9800GTX and GT 520, the other Kepler and Maxwell GPUs were measurably faster under Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. The high-end GeForce GTX 780 Ti was about 20% faster under Ubuntu 14.04 LTS over Windows 8.1 Pro x64.

With OpenArena, another long-standing open-source OpenGL game that in the past has been about equivalent under Windows and Linux, is running very nicely on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS against the latest state of Microsoft Windows. The high-end NVIDIA GPUs tested were faster for this game on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS compared to Windows 8.1 while the low-end NVIDIA GPUs tended to be slightly faster on Windows.

The trend of the high-end NVIDIA graphics cards being faster on Ubuntu 14.04 Linux remained true when running Unigine Heaven. The GeForce 600/700 series graphics cards performed noticeably better on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS compared to Windows 8.1 when we were using the latest NVIDIA proprietary drivers on each operating system from the 337 driver series.