Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 16.04 NVIDIA OpenGL Performance

With having a clean Windows 10 installation around for the benchmarking of Ubuntu Bash on Windows 10 and Windows vs. Linux Vulkan benchmarking, I also took the opportunity to run a number of OpenGL benchmarks on both Windows 10 and Ubuntu 16.04 Linux with the same hardware and set of graphics cards. In this article are benchmarks of Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 16.04 with various NVIDIA GeForce GTX 900 series graphics cards.

The AMD Radeon results will follow while this article is looking at the NVIDIA GeForce performance with Windows 10 Pro x64 using the latest Windows Insider build (14316) and an Ubuntu 16.04 development snapshot installed this weekend. The graphics cards used for this testing were the GeForce GTX 950, GTX 970, GTX 980 Ti, and GTX TITAN X to represent both lower-end and high-end GPUs. The system used throughout the entire benchmarking process was a Intel Xeon E3-1280 v5 CPU, MSI C236A Workstation motherboard, 16GB of RAM, 120GB Samsung SSD 850 EVO SSD, and the different NVIDIA GPUs.

The NVIDIA driver in use under Ubuntu 16.04 was the NVIDIA 364.15 release while the latest Windows version available for testing was the 364.72 release. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is powered by the Linux 4.4 kernel, Unity 7.4, and X.Org Server 1.18.3.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite a range of OpenGL benchmarks were run that are compatible natively with both Windows and Linux and known to be of similar quality ports. Only OpenGL is being looked at in this article and if you missed our earlier NVIDIA Vulkan Windows vs. Linux test that also included some D3D11 Windows vs. OGL Linux numbers, check out that article. If anyone wants to contribute any other test profiles for Windows vs. Linux benchmarking with their favorite games, patches welcome.