How OpenGL Graphics Card Performance Has Evolved Over 10 Years (phoronix.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A new report at Phoronix looks at the OpenGL performance of 27 graphics cards from the GeForce 8 through GeForce 900 series. Various Ubuntu OpenGL games were tested on these graphics cards dating back to 2006, focusing on raw performance and power efficiency. From oldest to newest, there was a 72x increase in performance-per-Watt, and a 100x increase in raw performance. The NVIDIA Linux results arrive after doing a similar AMD comparison from R600 graphics cards through the R9 Fury. However, that analysis found that for many of the older graphics cards, their open-source driver support regressed into an unworkable state. For the cards that did work, the performance gains were not nearly as significant over time.

Comments

Windows isn't as bloated as it used to be.

[whathappenedtomonday]

You almost got me up to that statement. I did a VM install of Win10 over the weekend; it failed the first time, because I thought that a fixed 16GB for the test partition would do. The dynamic container is at 24.738.004.992 bytes now after the Threshold 2 update. Nothing else was installed - just Win10 + updates.

Give it a try, grab the iso and fire up a VM. No need for a Windows key, you can skip entering it just like the activation.

Threshold 2, which like all updates is not optional, as we all know, took >1 hour on a 4 core system with a decent SSD and ~2,5GB RAM for the VM. I wonder what you'd call a "bloated" OS.

Re:My conclusion is that linux sucks for games

[mikael]

In 1995. when Quake made use of the floating-point and integer units of the Pentium CPU to do software texture-mapping in a custom engine, SGI realized that they had to bring out a software version of OpenGL that would run on desktop PC's. Back then some bits of OpenGL would be implemented in hardware (the "fast path"), and other bits in software (the "slow path"). It was a pain-in-the-ass for developers to try and divine which were slow and which were fast. Some combinations of vertex/color/normal attributes were fast and others were slow. Microsoft bought out a 3D game engine developer, pulled out the lower layers and created DirectX.

The 3Dfx brought out a piggy-back board, that worked with desktop PC's. Then SGI engineers left to form Nvidia, and a great race began. First texture-mapping was hardware accelerated, then both companies try to outdo each other every quarter with new extensions. That led to a legal battle, with Nvidia winning.
Eventually by 2001, they reached having the first true full hardware accelerated consumer 3D graphics acceleration for a PC. That's continued.