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S3 Linux Driver Outperforms Its Windows Twin In Nexuiz

Posted by timothy on from the battle-of-the-benchmarks dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Chrome Center has done some benchmarks with the proprietary S3 Chrome 400/500 Driver on Linux and Windows. They compared Nexuiz frame rates on a Phenom II system with a S3 430 GT — the surprising result: The Linux driver outperforms its Windows equivalent, offering frame rates about twice as high on average. The question now: Is the Linux driver that good or the Windows driver that bad?"

3 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. So what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    How is this at all surprising?

    Anyone who's done any serious graphics or GPGPU programming on Linux, and Windows (excluding Vista/7 with their fucked WDDM - and significantly slower api calls) - knows Linux practically always performs as good or better (and admittedly, in some cases slower too) than Windows (true for Intel, nVidia, and S3), assuming you're running on a rather bulky X11 server (eg: xorg), and with custom lightweight X11, things only get better.

    1. Re:So what? by Jurily · · Score: 0, Troll

      You (yes, you) know (do you?), it's (well, it might not be, but who knows) really hard (not easy, at least according to me) to read (decypher) your post.

  2. Re:Graphic features? by drsmithy · · Score: 0, Troll

    Believe it or not, people actually try to justify this.

    I presume by "justify" you mean "look at me funny and say 'why the hell do you care'" ?

    However, it still seems moronic that I don't have the choice -- how difficult can it be to simply disable the graphical subsystem? Doesn't it kind of show that Windows was never meant to be a server OS?

    No. Not in the slightest. Why would it ? Nobody except OCD, anal-retentive UNIX nerds would even give it a second thought, let alone expend effort trying to "fix" such a non-problem, so why would the Windows NT developers at Microsoft ?

    Sorry about that... I had to rant. Every now and then, someone comes up with yet another idea that will save Linux, or bring us closer to the Year of the Linux Desktop, in the form of something stupid like "Let's ditch X and put all the graphical stuff in the kernel!"

    None of the "graphical stuff" in Windows is in the kernel. Some parts of it run in *kernel mode* (depending on the particular version), but that's not the same thing (and it's no different to, for example, the kernel modules used by ATI, nVidia, et al).