NVIDIA GTX 680: Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu 12.04

[GreatEmerald]

Yea, it makes sense to compare stock Win7 to stock Ubuntu. Although it would be very interesting to see how it compares to optimised Win7 and optimised Ubuntu (TWM and such ).

[semhustej]

Care to explain? I've successfully used the Catalyst drivers + APPSDK for OpenCL development on both Windows 7 and Ubuntu (11.04 and 11.10 at least). Did they break something in the newest versions that I haven't heard about?

The problem with OpenCL implementation in Cycles is described here:

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.6/Source/Render/Cycles/OpenCL

[schmidtbag]

X.Org isn't the reason 3D performance is poor on open source drivers anyways. Mesa is the problem with 3D graphics stack. X.Org does have some issues, like in events and input, things that make compositing difficult. Things like running multiple drivers at the same time, and GPGPU computing are difficult because of X. X.Org nor X11 impose any significant limitation on the performance 3D games.

That's interesting and I'm sure you're right about that but you're missing 1 key point - xorg is relatively a mess of code at this point, which is (AFAIK) the reason why wayland was created in the first place. The extra clutter in X makes it more difficult to code for compared to wayland, at least that's the impression I've been getting. For something as complex as GPUs (which IMO are arguably the most complex hardware), anything that can make development more difficult and hindered will probably result in a less-than-perfect result. Since Windows probably gets more attention, doesn't have variations of DEs, and is likely a lot more consistent than X, its no surprise why it generally performs better.

[sgtGarcia]

More than gaming performance, I would like to know what's with cuda/opencl performance vs other nvidia & ati gfx cards.

[md1032]

While the performance seems to be comparable, I wonder how much performance improvement we'll see using Wayland. Will this push the linux graphics stack past windows? It'll be nice having a display server without all the X11 cruft that was based on 1980's graphics cards either way.

Too bad Nvidia doesn't play to support the protocol... yet.

GLX direct rendering does not go through the X11 server.

[Veerappan]

since Catalyst drivers have botched up OpenCL support

Care to explain? I've successfully used the Catalyst drivers + APPSDK for OpenCL development on both Windows 7 and Ubuntu (11.04 and 11.10 at least). Did they break something in the newest versions that I haven't heard about?

[Teho]

Maybe in 2019 Phoronix will ceases to compare the slow(est) [1] WM [2] to Windows and OSX.
*Sigh*

Ubuntu is the most popular desktop Linux distribution so comparing to it is only natural and it just happen to use Unity.

[Milyardo]

There is one thing which can shatter this dream. The proprietary driver is already so detached from X, that removal of X could make no difference. Of course, the free drivers have more potential. Some old hardware already performs better than on Windows.

X.Org isn't the reason 3D performance is poor on open source drivers anyways. Mesa is the problem with 3D graphics stack. X.Org does have some issues, like in events and input, things that make compositing difficult. Things like running multiple drivers at the same time, and GPGPU computing are difficult because of X. X.Org nor X11 impose any significant limitation on the performance 3D games.

[gilboa]

... And this with Unity 3D.

Maybe in 2019 Phoronix will ceases to compare the slow(est) [1] WM [2] to Windows and OSX.
*Sigh*

- Gilboa
[1]http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_desktop_managers1 &num=4
[2] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...desktops&num=2

[randomizer]

I'd be more interested in seeing the occasional comparison of the two doing something like running the Cycles renderer in Blender rather than these same few games each time. Unfortunately you can't really compare the AMD and NVIDIA cards (since Catalyst drivers have botched up OpenCL support), but you can compare like with like.