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

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 16.04 Gaming With NVIDIA's GTX 1070 & GTX 1080

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.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=23303

[Passso]

Awesome work Michael!

One may see an half empty glass as result, but the good point is that when a game is native or has a good port, Ubuntu/Linux does a great job, with performance comparable with Windows.

It seems that all the chain ( driver / system / libraries ) is in a real good shape.

[rhysk]

Agree, indicates the Linux-based platform stack -- putting aside the quality of the actual title making graphics API calls -- is in pretty good shape at the moment.

[Nille]

Metro and Bioshock are faster, because not all effects in the linux version available .... So nothing new or exiting ...

[Michael]

Dude, how did you score an Andescher?

I can get it in Chicago at binny stores.

[chuckula]

It looks like the hardware drivers and the OS itself are solid at a low level.
Basically, just as in Windows when a console game gets ported over poorly, bad ports of software that isn't properly written end up making for bad performance.

Having said all of that, even with the handicaps of software ports, most if not all of those games appeared to be playable even at 4K resolutions, so it's not like Linux is completely crippled.

[Xaero_Vincent]

Nice work Michael. In many games Windows 10 has Linux beat, which is no suprise but Linux has several wins too which is a suprise, especially Bioshock Infinite, which is just a eON wrapper game. Anyway, people can no longer say *ALL* games are worse on Linux.

This said, these results are just for Nvidia. Direct3D Windows vs OpenGL Linux with AMD would likely still be bone crushing and quite sad, however Vulkan Windows vs Vulkan Linux on AMD might be interesting to compare.

[Nille]

which is a suprise, especially Bioshock Infinite, which is just a eON wrapper game.

Not really, if the linux version has not the same quality as the windows one.

[Xaero_Vincent]

Not really, if the linux version has not the same quality as the windows one.

I've played Bioshock Infinite on both Windows and Linux and didn't notice any visual differences when maxed out. However, on my previous AMD Radeon hardware it performed worse on Linux than Windows with certain settings enabled.

This said, this game was tested at 4K, where the gap often narrows between Windows and Linux. However, if the game was vastly worse on Linux than Windows both visually and performance wise, wouldn't it make more sense if performance were about the same (if the visual quality was less on Linux) and not 30 FPS faster and also look uglier?

[F1esDgSdUTYpm0iy]

Anyway, people can no longer say *ALL* games are worse on Linux.

Worse? Too general of a description, in my opinion. Yes, they perform worse as far as graphics rendering goes but does that make them worse on Linux? Not necessarily. There is more to running a game than merely its frames-per-second metric.

Personally, I've noticed improved loading times, improved network latency, improved network bandwidth after switching to Linux; while gaming, that is. For others that mileage may vary but, ultimately, on Windows it's very unwise not to run at least an antivirus. And by now those have either become so bloated or full of ads (in the case of their free versions) that the AV alone will start hurting performance and user experience.