FreeBSD: A Faster Platform For Linux Gaming Than Linux?

Testing went straight away to the most demanding Linux OpenGL benchmark available, Unigine Heaven. Unigine Heaven is using a recent build of the Unigine Engine, which is the game engine used by OilRush and several other upcoming multi-platform games. When running this binary-only Linux benchmark with its OpenGL 3/4 renderer, PC-BSD 8.2 comes out on top. This is for both the 32-bit and 64-bit builds. PC-BSD/FreeBSD with the Linux binary compatibility was approximately 8% faster than Ubuntu 11.04 when both were using the same graphics driver. This first result was when pushing the GeForce 9800GT only moderately with a resolution of 1024 x 768.

When pushing the system even harder by upping the resolution to 1920 x 1080, FreeBSD/PC-BSD pulls out with a striking victory over Linux. Running the Unigine Heaven Linux binary on Linux was about 60% faster than running it natively on Ubuntu 11.04. This is real and can be easily reproduced by executing "phoronix-test-suite benchmark unigine-heaven" on each operating system with each test being carried out multiple times, etc.

Unigine Tropics is the slightly older benchmark from Unigine Corp but still very computationally and visually intense. At 1920 x 1080 with Unigine Tropics on the triple-core AMD system with NVIDIA graphics, the PC-BSD 8.2 operating system was 8% faster than Ubuntu 11.04 for both 32-bit and 64-bit environments.

Unigine Sanctuary is the oldest Unigine Engine benchmark available and this years old Linux binary still runs faster on BSD then it does on Linux.

Now it's a look at running the Nexuiz game at several different resolutions to look at how the performance scales.