Gaming Benchmarks: Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu Linux

When running Unigine Sanctuary, the least demanding of the Unigine engine technology demos / benchmarks, the OpenGL performance was nearly identical between their Windows and Linux builds.

The Unigine Tropics performance was also largely indifferent between Windows and Ubuntu Linux on the ThinkPad W510 notebook with the Intel Core i7 processor and NVIDIA Quadro graphics.

Lastly, with Unigine Heaven there were no major performance changes between the Windows and Linux platforms on this Lenovo notebook.

The results from this OpenGL game testing are similar to that of our workstation results earlier this month: for the most part, there is not a huge difference in performance between Microsoft Windows 7 Professional and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. With Lightsmark and Nexuiz when more taxing on the graphics card the NVIDIA graphics driver under Windows moved forward, but with the most demanding Unigine tests the performance was about the same. Of course, these results are just representative with regard to NVIDIA's proprietary driver on both platforms, with the results likely to be different when using the ATI Catalyst driver or if comparing the performance to the Linux Mesa/Gallium3D driver stack, in which case the Linux performance would be abysmal.