Phoronix: They Say A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words
...but what about two pictures?Yes, that is an early build of a future version of the Phoronix Test Suite running natively atop Microsoft Windows 7. Of course, the Phoronix Test Suite already runs atop OpenSolaris, *BSD, and Mac OS X too.How come? How will this benefit the Linux community? It will all be answered shortly, but for now you can chime in with your thoughts or ideas in the forums...
I regularly need to performance test Windows against Linux/UNIX for crypto speed and 3D rendering speeds for various clients. Access to PTS will make this a whole lot easier.
Reasons for this are obvious. It makes linux win :-). If windows is better on some benchmarks, developers will dig in and figure out why and improve linux. If linux wins, well, then people will use it :-).
Objective benchmarks that are meaningful will drive development. And Windows will have a harder time keeping up, maybe.
What this will do is create a fiercer competition between the OS's, and the end users will benefit.
I'm somewhat interested to see how the Nvidia propietary drivers score on Win7 vs. Linux. The recent interview suggested that they share 90+% of their code between platforms, and I'd love to see how well that actually is working for Nvidia with respect to cross-platform performance (and if there's any inherent bottlenecks in X or Windows).
I've seen Wine benchmarks in the past that suggest that Wine+Linux can actually run windows applications faster than windows itself (I believe it was some of Anandtech's recent coverage, might've been TechReport). I could see using PTS to comparatively benchmark a few windows game demos against Wine+Demos in PTS (or full versions of the game if there's legal issues running benchmarks on demo versions of said games).