NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 - Windows vs. Linux GPU Compute Performance

When it came to measuring the pure Vulkan compute capabilities of the RTX 3090 under each operating system, as would be expected the results were virtually identical. The NVIDIA Linux/Windows drivers continue to benefit from the shared sources and in the case of a test like vkpeak is relying almost entirely on just pure Vulkan performance with little overhead or obstacles around the operating system.

When carrying out some Vulkan-powered image upscaling/resampling benchmarks for a more real-world Vulkan compute workload, the performance again came out quite similar between operating systems on this AMD Ryzen desktop.

The proprietary OctaneBench for the OTOY OctaneRender engine saw similar performance between Windows and Linux.

With MAXON's RedShift software as a GPU-accelerated 3D renderer, Ubuntu 21.04 with the latest NVIDIA Linux driver was offering notably better performance than Windows 10.

Ubuntu 21.04 was also offering noticeably better performance for FAHBench as a measure of Folding@Home performance using OpenCL.

The open-source LuxCoreRender that with its v2.5 release has NVIDIA OptiX render support to complement its CUDA and OpenCL support saw mixed results. For some of the scenes the OptiX performance was measurably better on Windows while in other cases it was to Ubuntu's advantage.

Meanwhile the performance of Indigo Renderer with OpenCL via IndigoBench was virtually identical under both operating systems.