Is Windows 7 Actually Faster Than Ubuntu 10.04?

[deanjo]

Nice work, Michael!

The most important results are without doubt those of XPlane, Unigine and SPECviewperf,

Not sure how important SPECviewperf tests are when there is only one app in the tests that has a linux version still.

[Rovanion]

I would recommend the author of this article to display the results differently once you have the MacOS results in. In this article the graphs where unreadable. There were too many lines and it became almost impossible to keep track of which color was associated with which system and OS, especially if you are partially colorblind.

So I would suggest that you separate the line graphs by system in the next run. Yes it will result in many more graphs, but that also means more displayed ads which for you is a good thing.

The tables were great and actually saved the article from being unreadable.

[Apopas]

Ya, don't know what is up with the server. But going back the scheduler improvements found in Win 7

Yup, 2.6.28 is very old as well and Linux scheduler is improved a lot for desktops since 2.6.32.
The truth is one. Almost everyone (including me) believed till today that windows had the upper hand by a large marging in games. It has been proved that's not the case.

[Apopas]

Not sure how important SPECviewperf tests are when there is only one app in the tests that has a linux version still.

And games for Linux are rare as well, but that does not mean that the game tests don't have their importance.

[deanjo]

The truth is one. Almost everyone (including me) believed till today that windows had the upper hand by a large marging in games. It has been proved that's not the case.

That can't be truthfully said without test runs on DX as well. Like many other applications the ogl / DX performance can differ greatly especially in the unigine benches.

[Apopas]

That can't be truthfully said without test runs on DX as well. Like many other applications the ogl / DX performance can differ greatly especially in the unigine benches.

True, but still Linux can be tweaked a lot as well, so we will never be able to run a really objective test. Take for example that even Fedora (which is not as tweaked as Gentoo for example) was much much faster than Ubuntu with NVidia drivers. Over 50% if I recall correctly. Both me and you pointed that there is a problem with games in Ubuntu.
Think it in another way also, even if DX runs games faster than GL (not necessarily true though), the difference won't be that high to say that windows is the undisputable leader in games performance.

[Apopas]

Damned 1 minute limit

I believe, for example, that my Gentoo is gonna be faster than windows in the same machine, in almost every game. But Gentoo is not a desktop OS, so it doesn't count for many people. I use it as a desktop OS though.
So what do we have if we remove every subjective point of view and stay with the sheer numbers?

[deanjo]

True, but still Linux can be tweaked a lot as well, so we will never be able to run a really objective test. Take for example that even Fedora (which is not as tweaked as Gentoo for example) was much much faster than Ubuntu with NVidia drivers. Over 50% if I recall correctly. Both me and you pointed that there is a problem with games in Ubuntu.
Think it in another way also, even if DX runs games faster than GL (not necessarily true though), the difference won't be that high to say that windows is the undisputable leader in games performance.

That is all dependent on the implementation of course but one thing that has been shown over and over again for example is that unigine is a lot faster using DX. Also many apps are profiled and optimized in the windows drivers for their DX engines and may not have a ogl profile. 10 years ago you didn't see DX engines in professional CAD / Modelling / etc but now days pretty much all the major players default to a DX engine.

[monraaf]

Looks like the Phenom Quad-Core @ 2.20GHz system with HD 5770 was CPU limited in most benchmarks both on Linux and Windows. So it got a rather poor showing compared to the HD 4670 .

[karl]

Nice tests. Looking forward for the follow up.

For somebody looking for a medium PC configuration to run Linux on it, I found AX3 configuration to fit that role beautifully. It was on par with Windows on almost all gfx tests. The ATI Radeon HD 4670 seems to perform very nice and the drivers seems to be mature for this video card.