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.

Re:So we're using nearly 40% more power?

[jandrese]

It may be better than you think. Idle power draws are way down on most cards and they were not measured here. If it draws more power for the 8 hours a week you actually use it for gaming, but less power for the other 160 hours then you are probably going to come out ahead.

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.