NVIDIA's Linux Driver On Ubuntu 14.10 Can Deliver Better OpenGL Performance Than Windows 8.1

First up was the demanding Unigine Heaven benchmark. All three graphics cards on NVIDIA's binary drivers ran Heaven at 1920 x 1080 and then 3840 x 2140 (4K) on the Seiki monitor.

The performance of Unigine Heaven at 1920 x 1080 between Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu 14.10 with the proprietary drivers were virtually identical... It's largely to be expected given that the closed-source NVIDIA drivers between Windows and Linux and even Solaris/FreeBSD are largely derived from the same source tree. Our past benchmarks have also indicated largely the same performance between NVIDIA's drivers under different platforms.

The NVIDIA Windows vs. Linux performance is much better than the Intel Haswell results from yesterday that showed the Intel Windows driver largely leading the way.

When running the older Unigine Tropics tech demo, the NVIDIA Linux driver offered a significant lead over the Windows driver across all three graphics cards! The GeForce GTX 980 was 25% faster on Linux for this OpenGL benchmark than the Windows driver.