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

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Gaming on 17 June 2016 at 09:28 AM EDT. Page 1 of 7. 71 Comments.

For your viewing pleasure this Friday is our largest Windows vs. Linux graphics/gaming performance comparison ever conducted at Phoronix in the past 12 years! With the brand new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 graphics cards, their performance was compared under Windows 10 Pro x64 and Ubuntu 16.04 x86_64 when using the very latest NVIDIA Corp drivers for each OS. A range of Steam gaming benchmarks and more were done, including some cross-platform Vulkan graphics benchmarks. Continue on for this interesting comparison.

The GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 were tested on the same system under both Windows and Linux: a Xeon E3-1280 v5 Skylake CPU, MSI C236A Workstation motherboard, Samsung 950 PRO NVMe SSD 256GB, 16GB of DDR4-2133 EUDIMM memory, and the respective graphics cards. Windows 10 Pro x64 had all available updates as of 15 June 2016. The latest available driver as of testing time on the Windows side was the 368.39 driver release. Under Linux, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS had all available updates as of 16 June 2016 and the latest NVIDIA proprietary driver for Linux gamers is currently the 367.27 driver release.

Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 16.04 NVIDIA GTX 1070 GTX 1080

The Windows vs. Linux games/applications used for testing included Tomb Raider, F1 2015, GRID Autosport, The Talos Principle, Dota 2, Metro Last Light Redux, Shadow of Mordor, Insurgency, BioShock Infinite, Company of Heroes 2, Xonotic, GpuTest, Unigine Heaven, and Unigine Valley. Where applicable, the games were tested using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite but we did include some games this time around where we manually had to trigger the benchmark modes from the in-game test menus; if you want to see more of those games covered, see here.

Each of the games tested were run with the same image quality / graphics options under Windows and Linux. The native Linux builds of all games were tested.

This is a rather long article so it's a good time to remind you that if you'd like to see this entire article on a single-page, ad-free, please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium to take advantage of these features and more. Your subscriptions to Phoronix Premium, viewing the site without any ad-blockers, and PayPal tips are what make the continued Linux hardware testing at Phoronix possible. Please consider showing your support if you'd like to see more of these articles; coming up next week will be a similar Windows vs. Linux comparison on the AMD side, but pending support from this article may end up being initially only available to premium members otherwise.

Let's see now how the latest Linux games are performing against their Windows counterparts with the latest NVIDIA Pascal GPUs.


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