Linux/windows drivers differences

[romphoronix]

I'm curious to know why there are performance differences between windows and linux ?
Why some features of the chips are not implemented in the linux drivers ? shouldn't the base code to access those features be the same ??

Thanks.

[AlbertP]

AMD and nVidia share a lot of code between Windows and Linux drivers. But Intel's Linux driver is different.

The capabilities of Windows and Linux drivers differ for a lot of Intel chips. For example Linux is the only OS with OpenGL 2.0 on Pineview based netbooks according to Wikipedia.

Some features of the Windows driver are not yet ported to Linux. What feature(s) do you want to see on Linux?

There shouldn't be much performance difference between Windows and Linux, or are you using Direct3D programs in Wine?
Sometimes Linux performance is even better than on Windows, using native Linux programs.

[romphoronix]

I'm not looking for some specific features but this question comes from reading benchmark articles on Phoronix. It happens quite often that the performances are lower on linux than on windows. I find this a bit puzzling ?
About the 'missing' features I could take the example of the hybrid/switchable graphic technology found at ATI/NVIDİA on windows but not yet fully implemented on Linux. Why ?
And I guess there are some others features in the same case.

In fact I'm not sure I understand how those drivers are developed... why do they need a linux team and a windows team ? I could understand it for higher level but for the lower level I don't see what is different. If you have some kind of decoders or 3D feature on the chip of the graphic card the access/use should be the same on linux than on windows, isn't it ? is the X layer is playing a role that I'm missing ?

[AlbertP]

There aren't many Windows/Linux comparisons for Intel hardware on Phoronix.

And the problem with hybrid graphics is the X server which does not support this properly. Also a big problem are the ATI and NVidia proprietary drivers which force the X server to use their hardware only, and no Intel card. Those drivers also don't switch the mux when the Intel card is active.