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

Re:My conclusion is that linux sucks for games

[__aaclcg7560]

The big push to DirectX happened because OpenGL was just a royal pain in the ass to develop with.

Not quite. OpenGL was an alterative to the software rendering modes that most video games had in the early days. Once gamers saw Quake running in OpenGL in 1997, they ran out to the stores to buy OpenGL-compatible video cards. Microsoft didn't have an alternative API to compete with OpenGL. Hence, DirectX was born. It took a handful of years before DirectX stopped being a royal pain in the ass for most gamers.

Re:My conclusion is that linux sucks for games

[Ambassador Kosh]

Actually the grandparent is right. Windows has gotten much more performance over the last few versions. With Windows 7 MATLAB ran about 20% faster on Linux than Windows. With Windows 8 the Windows version was very slightly faster and with Windows 10 the different is about 5% now in favor of windows.

Overall I suspect it is nothing magical. Microsoft has just worked very hard to offload more work to the GPU and also to optimize many other aspects of their systems for power usage. I get about an hour more battery life on windows vs linux.

So we're using nearly 40% more power?

[mark-t]

While it's nice and all that we're getting 72x more performance per watt, since we are at 100x times the performance, that means that we are using 100/72=1.39 times the power that we used to.

I could start into a tirade about how this is contributing to global warming, but I'll leave that somewhat political stance for another time.