NVIDIA OpenGL: Windows 10 Pro vs. Ubuntu Linux Benchmarks

Published yesterday was a test of Intel Skylake graphics on Ubuntu 15.10 vs. Windows 10 with a focus on the OpenGL performance. In today's article is a similar cross-operating-system comparison but this time being featured are three NVIDIA graphics cards to see how the latest NVIDIA drivers are running.

With today's comparison are results from a GeForce GTX 780 Ti, GTX 950, and GTX 980 Ti to represent a generation-old graphics card, a modern lower-end graphics card, and a modern high-end graphics card, respectively. Microsoft Windows 10 Pro x64 was tested just like the Intel results. The latest public drivers were used in each case, which on Windows 10 was the 358.87 driver and under Linux is the 358.09 release.

The same Intel Core i5 6600K + MSI Z170A GAMING PRO system was used during all of the tests on Windows and Linux with the three Maxwell and Kepler graphics cards. Ubuntu 15.10 was running the Linux 4.2.0-17-generic kernel with default Unity desktop, X.Org Server 1.17.2, and GCC 5.2.1. Windows 10 Pro x64 had all available system updates at the time of testing.

All of the OpenGL benchmarks were run via the open-source Phoronix Test Suite software with OpenGL tests known to be of similar quality under both Windows and Linux.