Interesting article on Phoronix: NVIDIA On Ubuntu 14.04 Has Some New Advantages Over Windows 8.1 Of course all the benchmarks are with free games, but Unengine benchmark tests are pretty interesting. Their test machine uses Ubuntu, but I wonder how Arch would fare or even Ubuntu with Openbox desktop?
Makes me wonder how much is down to optimization for the platform it's running on... I remember Valve making a big deal about how Linux OpenGL was faster than Windows OpenGL/DirectX, and it turned out their Windows OpenGL optimizations were not as good as they thought they were. We shall see!
I'll see if I can run some benchmarks on my Arch system with the Xfce DE. Perhaps on sunday. Tomorrow I'll be moving all my stuff to the new apartment, and I expect to spend most of saturday to buy whatever I still need. I currently have the 337.19 nvidia driver, although my laptop GPU is of course not as powerful as the desktop variant of the GTX 670. Personally I have only had very positive experiences with the performance of nvidia's linux driver.
I had no idea the OpenGL driver was more optimized for Linux than Windows. Sounds like developers are more focused on Linux/Mac than Windows. I still havn't updated to the newest Nvidia drivers.
It would be more accurate to say that OpenGL developers are more focused on Linux/Mac than Windows. Windows apps tend to use Direct-Draw because Microsoft provide very efficient tools for that API, and so are more optimized in that direction. Apps that are developed for OpenGL tend to be more cross-platform oriented, and so will not have the same level of optimization (usually) for Windows as they will for other platforms. With modern operating systems there really shouldn't be a reason for overwhelming differences in performance between one OS and another. Of course, this assumes the core driver code is shared between the various OSen with only some wrapper code is used for interfacing, and also assumes equivalent levels of competence for application developers across all OSen (both somewhat dangerous assumptions, particularly the later).
