Apple Mac OS X OpenCL Performance vs. Linux
Similar to the caustic scene, the more-demanding "caustic3" scene was favorable to Ubuntu 10.04.1 and the NVIDIA 258.19 driver where it won by 41% on the NVIDIA 9400M.
Like the MandelGPU test where running the OpenCL kernel was faster with the Intel Core 2 Duo than the weak NVIDIA GPU, with MandelbulbGPU this is the same where on the P7350 it was faster by 21%. When comparing the NVIDIA GPU performance between two of our favorite operating systems, Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS with NVIDIA's binary OpenCL implementation there was a 7% favor to the Linux operating system.
While it's a pity we are unable to test the ATI/AMD OpenCL support under Mac OS X and Linux due to Apple hardware availability (where we would also be able to test the OpenCL CPU Linux performance with the ATI Stream SDK) or with a more powerful NVIDIA graphics processor on Mac OS X, looking at the Open Computing Language performance with these benchmarks on Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux was interesting. With the JuliaGPU test profile it heavily was in favor of Mac OS X but with SmallPT GPU it was heavily in favor of NVIDIA's Linux OpenCL driver and then the MandelGPU and MandelbulbGPU tests did not have a strong preference to one operating system or the other. We will be back soon with more ATI/NVIDIA/Intel OpenCL tests under Linux.
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