Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 16.04 Graphics Performance With NVIDIA's GTX 1070 & GTX 1080

Lastly are some results of Unigine Heaven/Valley under Windows and Linux. Unigine continues being one of our favorite OpenGL benchmarks due to its great Linux support and the results further show that in comparing the numbers to Windows:

The results are about the same under Windows and Linux for Heaven on the NVIDIA Pascal graphics cards.

Even with these very demanding Unigine tech demos, Ubuntu 16.04 has the potential to perform about the same as Windows 10 when using the latest NVIDIA Pascal drivers on the same hardware.

So what have we learned today? In the vast majority of the Steam Linux games out there, the performance remains much lower under (Ubuntu) Linux than Windows 10 Pro. But before anyone wants to simply blame Ubuntu, claim Linux driver issues, etc, in some of the tests there was comparable Linux performance or even having Tux come out on top. Especially for our long-standing tests where we know the quality of the code is comparable under Windows and Linux, the GTX 1070/1080 performance was effectively the same as expected when using the proprietary NVIDIA driver.

The Talos Principle, Dota 2, BioShock Infinite, Metro Last Light Redux, and Insurgency were among the games doing well on Linux. Among the games with noticeably lower performance on Linux were Tomb Raider, F1 2015, GRID Autosport, Shadow of Mordor, and Company of Heroes 2. Many of these ports with slower Linux performance were done by Feral Interactive and the slower performance of the game is likely attributed to the quality of the port/wrapper as opposed to a fundamental limitation of Linux, especially considering how well Unigine and some of the other results performed under Ubuntu with the NVIDIA high-end Pascal cards where the engine's natively target OpenGL as opposed to any wrapper.

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