Surprising Power Consumption Of Ubuntu 11.04 vs. Windows 7

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 29 June 2011 at 08:44 AM EDT. Page 7 of 9. 22 Comments.

Running Ubuntu 11.04 during the HD video playback process had burned through slightly more power than Windows 7 for the FirePro graphics on the Catalyst driver. This is not a surprise though since more of the CPU is being used under Linux for this test since Adobe Flash Player 10.3 on Linux only supports VDPAU, which is the video API not supported by the Catalyst Linux driver at this time. The Catalyst driver only exposes XvBA (X-Video Bitstream Acceleration), which is not yet supported by the stable Flash Player. Under Windows, ATI/AMD graphics accelerate the Flash video playback process.

The power consumption returned to being close to each other when running the Nexuiz game on the high-end workstation graphics card.

The Catalyst Linux driver actually produced a higher frame-rate than the Windows driver.


Related Articles