SteamOS vs. Ubuntu 13.10 Linux Benchmarks

Complementing the SteamOS vs. Windows 8.1 performance benchmarks published earlier in the week, here are more NVIDIA OpenGL Linux benchmarks when comparing Valve's Debian-based SteamOS performance to Ubuntu 13.10.

If you missed the SteamOS vs. Windows 8.1 performance comparison or the 7-way NVIDIA SteamOS GPU tests, be sure to check them out as well as the linked articles from there, since there were a lot of Phoronix exclusive articles over the past week since SteamOS 1.0 "Alchemist" went into public beta.

The results to share today are some quick SteamOS vs. Ubuntu 13.10 benchmarks I carried out last week. I'm still out of the country and will be until mid-January, but these are just some cursory tests I carried out prior to leaving and there will be a new thorough and more extensive comparison to come next month.

The tests in this article are of SteamOS (Linux 3.10-3-amd64 kernel, X.Org Server 1.12.4, GCC 4.7, NVIDIA 331.20) compared to Ubuntu 13.10 with its Linux 3.11 kernel, Unity 7.1.2 desktop, X.Org Server 1.14.3, and GCC 4.8. The Ubuntu 13.10 testing was done to be "out of the box" so the "nvidia-current" driver package was used for the Ubuntu baseline performance results. The nvidia-current package in Ubuntu 13.10 ships the NVIDIA 304.88 binary driver while tests were also done when installing the nvidia-319-updates package that provides the newer NVIDIA 319.60 driver.

The graphics cards used for testing in this latest SteamOS performance article on Phoronix was the GeForce GTX 680 and GeForce GTX 780 Ti. As the GTX 780 Ti support was only introduced in the NVIDIA 310.xx Linux driver, there is only Ubuntu 13.10 performance results when checking out the NVIDIA R319 graphics driver performance.

All the benchmarks were carried out in a standardized and fully reproducible way using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite software. So if you've already checked out the previous Phoronix articles on SteamOS, hit the next page and begin checking out the SteamOS vs. Ubuntu 13.10 performance results.