NVIDIA On Ubuntu 14.04 Has Some New Advantages Over Windows 8.1

With the GpuTest cases, similar to Xonotic, Windows 8.1 was oddly much faster than Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

While the Xonotic and GpuTest results generally did much better on Windows than Linux, with all of the other OpenGL titles tested the newer GeForce 600/700 series graphics cards were running noticeably faster on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS than Windows 8.1 Pro x64. In fact, the GeForce GTX 780 Ti was generally delivering about 20% higher frame-rates than Windows when running on the same hardware. The latest NVIDIA 337 series drivers for Linux and Windows were used throughout all testing.

Today's results were much more interesting than past NVIDIA proprietary driver comparisons where the Windows and Linux performance was largely the same due to the shared NVIDIA driver code-base between platforms, but now it seems the NVIDIA Linux driver is kicking it into top-gear or that other lower-level improvements within the Linux stack are benefiting the high-end gaming performance.

Our equivalent AMD Radeon Windows vs. Linux comparison will be out in a few days, where we should be able to see if the Linux performance is broadly getting faster or it's just the individual Linux GPU drivers becoming better optimized for OpenGL than their Windows counterparts. Though with yesterday's Intel Windows vs. Linux benchmarks we found Windows 8.1 was faster than Ubuntu 14.04 with Intel's Mesa driver. If you enjoy these sorts of tests done at Phoronix, please join Phoronix Premium to support this time consuming and costly testing operation. Thanks!