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NVIDIA Performance On Linux, Solaris, & Vista
AtomBOB suggests a Phoronix review comparing the performance of a Quadro graphics card on Windows Vista Ultimate, Solaris Express Developer, and Ubuntu Linux. The graphics card used was a NVIDIA Quadro FX 1700 mid-range workstation part. The cross-platform benchmark used was SPECViewPerf 9.0 from SPEC. Quoting Phoronix: "Using the Quadro FX1700 512MB and the latest display drivers, Windows Vista wasn't the decisive winner, but the loser... Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 5 with the 169.12 driver had overall produced the fastest results within SPECViewPerf. In only three benchmarks had Solaris Express Developer 1/08 outpaced Ubuntu Linux, but with two of these tests the results were almost identical.""
Vista has a new driver architecture and it is goiing to take some time for MS to improve the graphic subsystem performance. It will also take NVidia a while to optimise their code for Vista.
Even then, the Vista architecture might just have some inherent issues that are hard to code around.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
This is a comparison of drivers, if there were consistent performance difference between the os's, you could claim one OS is faster than the other. This isn't the case at all, the scores are all over the place. Sure, some difference is OS based, but when the results are such a small sample with not much of a clear trend, its only useful to compare which OS is better for this particular hardware / driver combo.
If you're a quattro user, your OS choice would surely be on software available for whatever particular professional application you are using the card for. As a sound designer, that would be for me, XP. I don't think many professionals are ready to jump to vista quite yet so I'm surprised that they have not included it. We are, after all, looking for stability.
I record my sleeptalking
Its an OpenGL test. The perf. difference between OpenGL and DirectX Nvidia implementations has always very large -- even in Windows XP.
What?! Windows did not have the best NVIDIA performance?!
This is a new one. No, really. Usually NVIDIA makes their Windows drivers their best drivers, and Linux is supported as an afterthought because they can make a few percentage points more in sales this way, and because it discourages reverse engineering their hardware, since those who would take the time and effort to do so won't on account of there being a working solution.
In other words, I am surprised that although Windows Vista has been such a mess in terms of compatibility and speed, that even the NVIDIA benchmarks put it last.
I read Slashdot every day, and until this moment I had never even heard of PCLinuxOS. I had to look it up.
Ubuntu, however... Ubuntu, my parents have heard of.
Don't know what metric Distrowatch uses, but it seems to be flawed.
Granted, I don't use Linux as a day-to-day OS, but I have some Linux apps I like which I run via Ubuntu in VMware Fusion. As a casual user, of the distros I've tried, Ubuntu wins hands-down. It's still too hard to set up for my parents, say, but not so hard that I don't just say "fsck it" and delete the partition, as I have done with all the others.
One more step towards Desktop Linux. But we need some real games to use these 3D capabilities!
Persian Project Management Software as a Service
Matrox had their lesson trying to sell their excellent cards to gamers. Everyone came to forums and whined about seeing "30 fps" while their friends have "120 fps". Some sane people tried to tell the specs of human eye but it didn't matter.
,his game got locked to 30 fps :)
I bet there are rich but non techie guys buying Quadro for gaming right now. I know a one bought ATI FireGL along with 15K RPM SCSI disk and couldn't sleep because of noise. Not just that
Things can only go downhill for Microsoft now. Free drivers will be even cleaner and the performance gap will widen.
History has shown that the higher quality product does not always win. I bet if I randomly took 100 people off the street, put them in a room and asked what Linux was, maybe 5 at the most would have an idea, if I asked what Windows was, at the very least they could tell me it was made by Microsoft and came with their computer. Linux distros do not have the marketing capabilities that Microsoft does, and in a world where people think things should get easier to use overtime, Linux will not take even 10% of the desktop marketshare.
Mod the fucking parent up. Why the hell is this modded down, it has a good point.
/. without hearing about the horrible DRM, or the incredibly common and fatal Red Ring of Death (How the fuck could Microsoft let such a flaw slide? Answer: Microsoft doesn't give a shit about the console working. Once you buy the console, they got their sale, who gives a shit if it works. Fish oil, my friends. They have the money and the market share, that's the only metric for product success.)
Microsoft is on its way to irrelevancy. Its losing market share in all its markets. Its losing desktop operating systems to the likes of Mac and Linux and even smaller contenders like *BSD and Solaris. (Some may argue BSD isn't so small, what I mean by it is *BSD isn't really what it used to be and is basically getting squashed by Linux and its own descendant: Mac OS X.
Its because Windows is aging, and not gracefully. Hell, by the time Windows became a little more independent from DOS back in the day it was already pathetically aged. But by that point Microsoft was bursting out as a horribly anti-competitive company. I remember one post elsewhere on this site stating that "UNIX has matured, Windows has aged." They were correct.
Then there are a shitload of markets Microsoft is in they never secured simply because those experienced with products in the market knew a crappy thing when they saw it: I think one of the best examples of this was the WebTV debacle. Another example is X-Box. Sure, the damn thing is popular, but its losing Microsoft money. Wii is beating out the 360. Though the 360 is beating out the PS3 by a wide margin. though I doubt its on the account of quality of the 360 as a lack of quality and real marketing for the PS3. I never liked Playstation anyway, only got popular because Sony managed to hype it way too fucking much. Note that the PSP and PS3 are flopping like stranded fish because gamers have finally caught on to what pieces of crap the consoles are.
The 360 is worse. I can't go to many gaming news sites or even a few articles here on
What gives me a fucking orgasm is when I see their existing killer apps like IE, Windows, and Office start to diminish not only in quality, (Going from bad to worse.) but also popularity and install base. Like, as I said earlier, Windows losing its share, and the reality that the whole reason we're seeing IE7 and IE8 is because the likes of Safari, Firefox, and Opera are starting to beat the shit out of IE. (6 years between IE6 and IE7 should have made this obvious. They got cocky knowing that crushed Netscape and so they felt they didn't have to do anything with the browser, and then enter Firefox. Note now how IE7 acts like an FF wannabe, and now IE8 will be acting like a Safari wannabe.) And With Office 2007 ruining everything people are going off to Google Apps and OOo which deserve more applause than the piece of trash that is Office.
What does Internet Explorer, Windows, and Office have in common? They're unoriginal, pieces of garbage, and they landed their commercial success thanks to lock-in, embrace, extend, extinguish, anti-competitive practice, partner backstabbing, and FUD. It sure as *hell* wasn't thanks to standards-compliance or making a GOOD product of all things.
Go ahead and mod me a fucking troll, but we all know that Microsoft is evil and deserves to burn for what its done to companies that actually deserved to shine. Netscape, Spyglass, Be. Down with Microsoft and its cock-sucking lapdogs.
These are the same people who when asked what kind of computer they have answer with "black". Also, not many people can associate the maker of the softare they use with the actual software application. You ask them which browser they use and they will say "I don't know. I just click on the blue 'e'." despite the fact that the title bar says "Internet Explorer" 100% of the time the application is open. So I hope you don't expect them to know Microsoft created it if they don't even know its name.
As far as marketing capabilities, I hardly ever see a Microsoft commercial. When I do they don't ever specify any particular product in the commercial. How does that really sell Windows or Office? All the marketing seems to happen behind the scenes from the point of view of the end consumer using deals that happen between OEMs and Microsoft salespeople.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
I'm as much for open source as the next guy, but for the love of all that is holy, what are you talking about? If marketing can be open sourced, how will it work? "Someone will innovate and figure that problem out"?
Square pegs don't fit every type of hole. No matter how much we sit around and think about it, no "innovation" will make it fit. We can make some sort of hack and call it a square peg fitting in a round hole, but it isn't really.
The difference between programming and marketing is that marketing isn't about standing on the shoulders of others. Giving away your previous work isn't going to help your successor market to any significant effect.
They have invented "open-source" marketing in the sense of hacks, like viral marketing, that aren't really open source but sort of a vague gesture in that direction, but don't expect traditional marketing to be going anywhere.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
This is an openGL test. Nvidia's linux drivers for openGL have been really fast for a long time now. In fact they've confirmed that they use the same driver code for windows and linux, just with a different API exposed.
What you're talking about is that the video acceleration APIs are not exposed for linux (purevideo). This is still the case, and annoying.
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