Windows 7 vs Ubuntu 9.10 - 3D Benchmarks

In the past I've done benchmarks regarding Wine software, today I am going to do something a bit different. Unigine is a cross-platform real-time 3D engine, I stumbled across awhile back on some message boards I am a part of. Since it runs natively cross-platform I have been curious to see exactly how drastic the performance difference of the engine is between the Windows and Linux platforms. Since I recently installed Windows 7 I decided to sit down and put the software through its paces.

The Tests: Unigine offers two free benchmarks - Tropics and Sanctuary. I ran both demos using OpenGL (because OpenGL runs on both platforms natively and DirectX does not).

The Hardware: While my hardware is not fastest in the world it is (as of posting this) relatively new and decently quick. Processor - Intel p9700 2.8ghz Dual Core, RAM - 4gigs of DDR3, Video Card: nVidia 260m with 1gig DDR3 dedicated memory (Running the latest stable nVidia driver on both Linux (190.42) and Windows (195.62)).

The Software: Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit, Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) 64bit, & Unigine Benchmarks

The Results:

Tropics -

• Windows
• - 1680x1050: 30.5 fps
• - 1024x768: 44.8 fps
• - 640x480: 59.8 fps
• Ubuntu
• - 1680x1050: 14.9 fps
• - 1024x768: 23.6 fps
• - 640x480: 30.9 fps

Sanctuary -

• Windows
• - 1680x1050: 35.2 fps
• - 1024x768: 61.9 fps
• - 640x480: 99.9 fps
• Ubuntu
• - 1680x1050: 17.3 fps
• - 1024x768: 27.9 fps
• - 640x480: 48.9 fps

Wrapping Up: The numbers speak for themselves. In the realm of 3D graphics it is clear that Ubuntu still has a long way to go if it ever wants to meet (or possibly beat) the performance Windows has. In all of the above tests Ubuntu scored between 48% and 55% lower frame rate than the same benchmark on Windows.