Mac OS X 10.6.2 vs. Ubuntu 9.10 Benchmarks

The Crafty performance between Mac OS X 10.6.2 and Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit were close, but the 32-bit version really struggled in this chess engine benchmark.

Mac OS X 10.6.2 was superior to Ubuntu 9.10 with the Tachyon ray-tracing engine where it was completing the ray-tracing process in almost half the time.

The 32-bit version of Ubuntu was much slower than the 64-bit version with C-Ray, while Mac OS X managed to pull a slight lead in front of Ubuntu with this second ray-tracing benchmark.

Ubuntu 9.10 (with the 32-bit and 64-bit wins being added together) had won about ten of the sixteen benchmarks in this Mac OS X vs. Ubuntu Linux comparison. Mac OS X 10.6.2 though had a particularly strong advantage in the heavy computational tests like Crafty, the ray-tracing benchmarks, and PostgreSQL. Snow Leopard, however, had performed quite poorly with the NVIDIA graphics due to the regression we pointed out earlier in this article. Hopefully the bug that is seriously hampering the NVIDIA OpenGL performance on Mac OS X when running at different resolutions will be fixed in the near future.

You can compare your Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux (along with *BSD and OpenSolaris) systems using the latest version of the Phoronix Test Suite, our flagship benchmarking and performance profiling software. Windows benchmarking support is coming in 2010 to the public version along with image quality comparison support. We will be back with more benchmarks shortly.