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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.
Linux has much less overhead and is often tailored to squeeze every ounce of power out of it's hardware. MS is a little more loose in that it will cater to as much hardware as possible at the cost of performance.
Linux if built for specific hardware can achieve much better performance than Windows in it's current state. I say current state because Xbox is an example where Windows could be optimized to perform for specific software hence avoid all the extra validation that eats up the hardware.
That might have been true 10 years ago, but at this point I doubt it.
All of it. Most performance improvements are in the driver side, and drivers for Windows are more performant than Linux versions in general. Windows isn't as bloated as it used to be. The fact that you can run Windows 10 on a 2GB tablet with pretty good performance is a testament to this. You should choose Linux because it is Open, not for performance reasons.
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.
All of it. Most performance improvements are in the driver side, and drivers for Windows are more performant than Linux versions in general. Windows isn't as bloated as it used to be. The fact that you can run Windows 10 on a 2GB tablet with pretty good performance is a testament to this.
But the tablet version of Windows 10 is probably not the best example since it's been optimized for the hardware (drivers). And as I stated, until you've come across a sandboxing issue, you don't know how much validation is actually being done. This applies to Windows 10 as well.
You should choose Linux because it is Open, not for performance reasons.
I totally agree with this. It still doesn't put Linux behind Windows performance wise. As a mainstream desktop OS Linux simply hasn't lived to the expectations of users and that's why Windows is still doing very well.
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.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
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.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
I hope I didn't brain my damage.
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.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
This article is not that interesting, primarily because they used high settings + 2560x1440 on old 256MB (!) cards, so most likely those cars are bottlenecked by gpu system ram texture swapping, showing lower performance and lower power reading than if more reasonable settings had been used. We're not seeing GPU power compared, but vram bottlenecks instead.
The main reason I've favored intel MBs recently is that they've opened sourced their graphics, which are good enough for me, so I don't have to worry about them. But then, I'm not a gamer. Are there folks out there who need the high end graphics stuff for something besides games?
PS
Just for the record, I have ways of wasting my time that may not be any better than playing games so I'm not going to adopt a 'holier than thou' attitude towards gamers. And even I may benefit from the gamer world because gaming does push technology.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
How fast MATLAB runs will vary based on how much CPU time it can get. If Xorg+WM takes more CPU time than Windows does then MATLAB won't have as much CPU time to run with.
Anything that makes the OS offload more work or do work more intelligently will increase the speed of any cpu bound operation. Just like you do the same total number of operations if you use a triple nested loop to multiply two matrixes or you use xGEMM. However the xGEMM version will run almost 100x faster since it uses the CPU FAR more efficiently. If Microsoft has made their system more highly optimized and better at offloading that would make MATLAB faster.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!