NVIDIA's Linux Driver Continues Offering Similar OpenGL Performance To Windows

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 16 June 2017 at 10:31 AM EDT. Page 1 of 3. 56 Comments.

Earlier this month with some fresh Windows vs. Linux benchmarks were numbers showing how the open-source Radeon driver stack is now nearly on-par with the Radeon Windows driver as well as how the Intel Linux graphics performance is getting closer to parity too. In this article are the least interesting numbers: the NVIDIA Linux vs. Windows 10 results.

I say least interesting because it's not exactly new that the Windows vs. Linux driver performance is nearly the same on the NVIDIA side. It's been that way for years with NVIDIA's Linux driver competitiveness coming from the largely shared code-base between platforms so its OpenGL and Vulkan support is in great shape, and the same goes for their Solaris and FreeBSD support too. The downside, of course, to many Linux enthusiasts/gamers is their driver remains closed-source.

But in having done the fresh Intel and Radeon graphics tests, here are the latest NVIDIA numbers for those keeping track. The same set of OpenGL test-cases known to be of similar quality under Linux and Windows were used for testing in just looking at the driver impact and this comparison not about judging the quality of Linux game ports, etc. This article is only looking at the OpenGL performance while some fresh Windows vs. Linux Vulkan numbers will come soon.

NVIDIA Graphics Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 17.04

For this comparison were tests of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti on the Core i7 7700K box when running Windows 10 Pro x64 with the 382.53 driver as the latest available. On the Linux side was Ubuntu 17.04 x86_64 with the 381.22 binary driver. The OpenGL benchmarks on each platform were run via the Phoronix Test Suite.


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