Apple Mac OS X OpenCL Performance vs. Linux

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 26 August 2010 at 08:23 AM EDT. Page 3 of 3. 8 Comments.

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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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.