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Windows vs. Linux On 3D Performance
Linux Games have posted this article about Windows VS Linux on 3D performace. They tested Quake III with Matrox G400, NVidia GeForce 256 DDR, and 3DFX Voodoo 3 3000 -- all with their latest drivers (both Linux drivers and Windows drivers). There are some interesting results, and even a few surprises. What do you think about the results?
It's all X's fault. That said, having a networked client/server GUI beats the shit out of a single-user, single desktop GUI anytime.
It's a shame you can't mod and post in the same story; I'd like to be able to both negate the "insightful" rating and explain why it's BS.
Take a look at the drivers they used. Not a one of them sends data over the X pipe. The X server basically is there to say, "yeah, you can bang directly on the hardware" and then get out of the way.
If they were sending data over the X pipe, you'd definitely know it. 3D hardware acceleration is often bandwidth limited; you could get up to a 50% drop in framerate without direct rendering. Smart design would reduce this problem, but I still suspect you'd see 70% optimal framerate, max... and in the LinuxGames tests, 70% was the worst case, not the best.
What was the best case? 99% framerate. This suggests to me that it's not idle processes or the kernel hogging CPU, it's not any weirdness from X or kswapd... it's just that some drivers are better than others. And right now, it looks like Windows drivers are 5% to 40% better than Linux drivers. Frankly, since Windows sales are 500% to 40000% better than Linux sales, I'm not complaining about driver quality.
I am surprised to see the 3Dfx drivers do so poorly, though. Isn't anyone helping out Daryll Strauss now that we've got source code available?
But of course, just how much can you trust the benchmarks? They ran it on one game, using a particular configuration, for a specific kernel.
Well, aside from the usual difficulties, there was one special case; the Matrox testing was done using full OpenGL drivers under Linux and a specific Quake 3 "TurboGL" driver under Windows; TurboGL drivers are Matrox's OpenGL subsets designed to run one game per DLL. In fact, the TurboGL driver postdates the Linux Mesa drivers; at one time (and probably still) the Linux implementation was significantly faster than the full Matrox OpenGL.
Under Windows you're drivers can talk near directly to the hardware, and their are less layers of protection slowing things down. Under Linux, their are more layers of protection between the hardware and the drivers, not to mention things have to talk more directly to a windowing system like X.
This means that in general linux games, etc.. will be more stable than their Windows equivalents, and if they crash, again in general, your system should be able to survive. (Even if you have to telnet in and reboot.)
Here's where DRI and XFree 4.0 come in. With DRI a driver can talk much more directly to the hardware, and generally speed things up, and provide more features.
So in Windows you get a slight speed increase in drivers at the sacrifice of stability. Of course, anything dealing with hardware/drivers can cause complete system lockups, its just less likely in Windows than in Linux.
A better comparison would be either Linux to NT 4.0, or Linux with XFree 4.0 to Windows 2000.
As it stands, you can get a nice idea of the slowdown by the GeForce drivers, which are ownly slightly faster in Windows than in linux. Of other note, is that the drivers in Linux are not optimized for games, as the article brought out several times. It would be VERY interesting to see some Linux vs. NT/2000 benchmarks in workstation operations(cad/design/etc...)
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As Linux grows because of its capabilities in other areas and its openness, it will gain market share, and the disparity between the two will decrease. Just give it time
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