NVIDIA Performance On Linux, Solaris, & Vista

AtomBOB suggests a Phoronix review comparing the performance of a Quadro graphics card on Windows Vista Ultimate, Solaris Express Developer, and Ubuntu Linux. The graphics card used was a NVIDIA Quadro FX 1700 mid-range workstation part. The cross-platform benchmark used was SPECViewPerf 9.0 from SPEC. Quoting Phoronix: "Using the Quadro FX1700 512MB and the latest display drivers, Windows Vista wasn't the decisive winner, but the loser... Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 5 with the 169.12 driver had overall produced the fastest results within SPECViewPerf. In only three benchmarks had Solaris Express Developer 1/08 outpaced Ubuntu Linux, but with two of these tests the results were almost identical.""

What is the difference?

[moreati (119629)]

I've wondered this a while. What is the difference between the gaming cards and the workstation cards from Nvidia and ATI? Do they just have better DACs? Certified driver support for business apps? Or is the GPU itself somehow?

Alex

Re:What is the difference?

[by Anonymous Coward]

The difference between the Quadros and the consumer cards used to come down to hardware OpenGL overlay support, if I remember right.

Re:What is the difference?

[sxeraverx (962068)]

They have different priorities. Gaming cards try to keep the framerate up by degrading image (not showing every single texture, e.g.), if need be, while cards for stuff like CAD and the like lower the framerate to show every detail requested of them.

Re:What is the difference?

[LoRdTAW (99712)]

Gaming cards try to keep the framerate up by degrading image (not showing every single texture, e.g.), if need be

Thats called culling and it is implemented in software, not hardware.

If I remember correctly there was a simple hack posted on Toms Hardware a while back for converting a Radeon to a FireGL. You simply solder an SMT resistor to a certain trace on the chip package and it pulls a line low. That line actually signals the BIOS to report the card as a Radeon or a FireGL. So in essence the Radeon and FireGL are the EXACT SAME CARD! The only difference is the FireGL drivers look for a Radeon reporting itself as a FireGL. This keeps production simple and even the video card BIOS versions the same.

The FireGL and Quattro cards come with optimized drivers for specific 3D programs like AutoCAD, Maya, 3DSMax, Light Wave etc. There is a drop down box that lets you select the program your using and it loads the finely tuned driver for that program.

Stereo 3D Support Is One

[maz2331 (1104901)]

The Quadro boards allow OpenGL stereoscopic images to be displayed in a window, and the non-Quadro boards do not. If you want really good 3D, you need a Quadro.

I use them for my stereoscopic video stuff with either a pair of shutter glasses or 3D HMD goggles, and can do a live, 3D viewfinder to compose the scene, align cameras, etc.

Re:True, but...

[ozmanjusri (601766)]

This just gave me a bunch of confusing text:

No, you've just accidentally switched to Firefox on Slashdot.

Wait a few moments, the cognitive dissonance will pass and you'll be up and trolling like a champ again.

Re:True, but...

[JohnBailey (1092697)]

If you really want to blow your mind, try typing in:

        man woman

Story of my life :-(

Re:True, but...

[Dunkirk (238653)]

I lol'ed the first time I need to check my security log, and typed `less secure'.

Re:What is the difference?

[alex4u2nv (869827)]

I had the very same question, and this article from Nvidia turned out to be very enlightening.
Quadro vs FX -- http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro_geforce.html [nvidia.com]

According to the article, there are some major differences between the two architectures. Where features are programmed either at the hardware layer (quadro), or at the driver layer.

Re:the difference does not matter.

[recoiledsnake (879048)]

What's significant here is that Windows has lost it's graphics crown. DRM and bloat or industry defection for the same reasons, we all know the root cause. Free software is simply cleaner and works better. If the ability to run DirectX 9 under Wine was not enough to move gamers to Linux, this is. Things can only go downhill for Microsoft now. Free drivers will be even cleaner and the performance gap will widen.

From TFA:

Then in September, we had looked at NVIDIA's multi-GPU performance under Linux and Windows when running two GeForce 8600GT 256MB graphics cards in SLI (Scalable Link Interface). Windows XP and the ForceWare driver had outpaced Linux in every gaming test we conducted.

The drivers have a lot more influence than you give it credit for.

I'm going to have to call BS

[Tsaot (859424)]

Free software is simply cleaner and works better.

I have to call BS on that. If I have to choose between the latest versions of Open Office and Microsoft Office, I will take M$'s closed solution hands down. The interface on 2007 is vastly improved over other office offerings out there. Making something free and open source does not make it good. I can think of many free applications that don't make the grade in cleanness and usability when compared to commercial offerings.

Re:

[Bottlemaster (449635)]

I have to call BS on that. If I have to choose between the latest versions of Open Office and Microsoft Office, I will take M$'s closed solution hands down.

Is this supposed to bring us to a meaningful conclusion? If I have to choose between the latest version of Microsoft Office and gouging my eyes out with a dull spoon, I will take M$'s closed solution hands down.

While it's worthwhile to compare the solutions you mentioned, especially when the two products appear to be competing for the title of most bloa

Re:the difference does not matter.

[bigpicture (939772)]

You think? I remember and have followed a similar kind of scenario, it started over 30 years ago when I was younger. It went something like this: GM was the Biggest of the Big. Had a market share greater than all other automobile manufactures combined. Had revenues higher than the GNP of 90% of the worlds nations. etc. etc. etc. They developed this Business Model called "Planned Product Obsolescence". (Your vehicle was planned to be scrap in about 10 years or before.)

There was also another little automobile manufacturer called Toyota with a very small market share, they made crappy little vehicles, used to be called "piss pots". They had a Business Model called "Continuous Improvement". There was a historic event in 2007 that went quietly unnoticed, Toyota surpassed GM in world market share and revenues.

Re:But Microsoft is not GM

[AJWM (19027)]

Microsoft has been reporting 15% growth in revenues the U.S., 20 to 30% growth abroad each quarter. [emphasis added]

Amazingly enough, Microsoft has been known to lie about some things. I suggest you review the fine print on those "reports", and then ponder why, if Microsoft's growth is really as reported, their stock hasn't been doing as well as it historically used to. Their cash reserves are also shrinking. Then there are the legal battles they're fighting.

That is the picture of a company on the way down.

Re:the difference does not matter.

[by Anonymous Coward]

You argument is flawed. You're arguing because windows is better known it will always
have the largest market share. The same could have been said about IBM pcs, or lotus 1-2-3,
Borland's compiler suite, or wordstar word processor.

The fact of the matter that next winner has to start out small because it gets to grab
marketshare. Google is an excellent counterexample to your argument. They were just 2-3 people
in 1998 working on a master's thesis project when Yahoo and AOL were the big thing. And where
is AOL now? How much marketshare does Yahoo have for search engines?

Personally I think that Dell selling preinstalled Linux boxes in the U.S. was the first toll
of the death bell for Microsoft. Then walmart selling out the green PCs was the next tolling of
the bell, and now that Asus is selling Eepc laptops I think is the first nail in the coffin for Microsoft.

Will Microsoft die overnight? No. Will they go out with a bang? No. I think they will go out with
a whimper within the next 5 years unless they somehow manage to reverse their course like they
did in 1995 and embrace the fact that GPL software is here to stay and start using it.

   

Re:the difference does not matter.

[glitch23 (557124)]

I bet if I randomly took 100 people off the street, put them in a room and asked what Linux was, maybe 5 at the most would have an idea, if I asked what Windows was, at the very least they could tell me it was made by Microsoft and came with their computer. Linux distros do not have the marketing capabilities that Microsoft does, and in a world where people think things should get easier to use overtime, Linux will not take even 10% of the desktop marketshare.

These are the same people who when asked what kind of computer they have answer with "black". Also, not many people can associate the maker of the softare they use with the actual software application. You ask them which browser they use and they will say "I don't know. I just click on the blue 'e'." despite the fact that the title bar says "Internet Explorer" 100% of the time the application is open. So I hope you don't expect them to know Microsoft created it if they don't even know its name.

As far as marketing capabilities, I hardly ever see a Microsoft commercial. When I do they don't ever specify any particular product in the commercial. How does that really sell Windows or Office? All the marketing seems to happen behind the scenes from the point of view of the end consumer using deals that happen between OEMs and Microsoft salespeople.

Re:the difference does not matter.

[pizzach (1011925)]

History has shown that the higher quality product does not always win.

But that is why Linux is destined for greatness. We have both the higher quality product and the lower quality product, GNOME and KDE! There is no way we can lose with this monopoly or great-suckiness.

*I think I just hemorrhage about 5 mod points indirectly with this post at a poor attempt at humor

Re:the difference does not matter.

[manekineko2 (1052430)]

I'm as much for open source as the next guy, but for the love of all that is holy, what are you talking about? If marketing can be open sourced, how will it work? "Someone will innovate and figure that problem out"?

Square pegs don't fit every type of hole. No matter how much we sit around and think about it, no "innovation" will make it fit. We can make some sort of hack and call it a square peg fitting in a round hole, but it isn't really.

The difference between programming and marketing is that marketing isn't about standing on the shoulders of others. Giving away your previous work isn't going to help your successor market to any significant effect.

They have invented "open-source" marketing in the sense of hacks, like viral marketing, that aren't really open source but sort of a vague gesture in that direction, but don't expect traditional marketing to be going anywhere.

Surprised..

[LingNoi (1066278)]

I am surprised by this as I would have thought Nvidia would have put more effort into their Vista driver with Linux drivers being mostly on the back burner. I am assuming it is because their Linux driver is old code (which we all know contains less bugs then new code) whereas the Vista driver is written from scratch?

Either way I think this shows the awesomeness of Ubuntu and Linux. ^_^

Why be suprised?

[EmbeddedJanitor (597831)]

It isn't just the code that impacts performance, but the driver architecture too.

Vista has a new driver architecture and it is goiing to take some time for MS to improve the graphic subsystem performance. It will also take NVidia a while to optimise their code for Vista.

Even then, the Vista architecture might just have some inherent issues that are hard to code around.

Re:

[bcmm (768152)]

It's been known to Linux gamers for a while that games that run on both Windows and Linux will generally perform better, often by 10-15% (by FPS), on Linux, at least on NVIDIA hardware.

Re:

[Svartalf (2997)]

It has a little less to do with them putting effort into the driver and more to do with the interrupt handling model and how OpenGL
ties into the OS as a whole.

And, you'd be assuming wrong. Neither NVidia nor AMD have old or differing code, from what I understand, for EITHER OpenGL API layer.

Re:

[JohnBailey (1092697)]

I am surprised by this as I would have thought Nvidia would have put more effort into their Vista driver with Linux drivers being mostly on the back burner. I am assuming it is because their Linux driver is old code (which we all know contains less bugs then new code) whereas the Vista driver is written from scratch? Either way I think this shows the awesomeness of Ubuntu and Linux. ^_^

Except these are workstation graphics cards. And Windows is the one on the back burner. The CGI industry has been using Unix variants for years, and more recently many are moving to Linux for cost considerations.

Re:

[sg_oneill (159032)]

Vistas desktop composition mode I suspect has a share of blame as well. Basically the thing puts a degree of separation between the final render buffer and the monitor to allow some of vistas special-effects to do there thing (Ie the alt tab effects, etc), and this neuters many tricks and optimisations used to squeeze fps out of the system.

I know its all gone and messed up Open GL, but heck I might just be bitter on that point, since I cant for the life of me find an accelerated GL driver for my Vista Mobil

Re:

[Alexx K (1167919)]

No. I have read it here [schneier.com] and here [auckland.ac.nz], but I'm not certain whether Vista actually does this or if it's just a massive fud campaign. From what I've read, it seems to be true. But as I said, I'm not 100% sure.

Re:Surprised..

[recoiledsnake (879048)]

It's mostly FUD. See here (read all three parts) [zdnet.com]

Re:Surprised..

[vux984 (928602)]

Its like reading one idiot correct another idiot... fta:

In this case, the unsupported assertion starts with market share numbers pulled out of thin air. Under the heading "Disabling of Functionality," Gutmann writes: ...For example many sound cards built on C-Media chipsets (which in practice is the vast majority of them) support Steinberg's ASIO (Audio Stream I/O), a digital audio interface that completely bypasses the Windows audio mixer and other audio-related driver software...

See how he slipped that little statement in there to make the problem he's discussing seem like something that will affect "the vast majority" of Windows systems? The trouble is, the vast majority of sound cards are not "built on C-Media chipsets." Don't take my word for it; that's what the company itself says. In reporting on a 2006 deal between C-Media and Asus, DigiTimes quotes a report in the Chinese-language Economic Daily News (EDN)

        C-Media anticipates that its market share in the high-end audio IC market will hit 10%, up from the current 1-3%, according to the company...

The last time I looked, 1-3% was a tiny blip, not the "vast majority."

So the first idiot says the vast majority of audio chipsets are C-media... and the 2nd idiot thinks he's counting him by quoting C-media claim they have well under 10% of the 'hign-end audio ICs'. The two assertions aren't even in conflict for crying out loud.

Consider Toyota... both the worlds largest car company and simultaneously barely represented in the exotic high end car segment. So C-Media is a Toyota of audio chips; sounds about right. This is like a bad slashdot debate, not journalism. On both sides.

broken

[phrostie (121428)]

the past few drivers had been getting better and better, but this one broke about half my 3D apps.
the graphics start ok, but when i make any inputs(keyboard or mouse) what ever it is crashes.

this is on a HP Pavillion Amd turion64 running 64bit Debian at Testing

Re:

[Curtman (556920)]

the past few drivers had been getting better and better, but this one broke about half my 3D apps.

Same here. I can use Maya for 5 or 10 minutes, and then X goes nuts. I can move the mouse, but can't click on, or type anything. I have to ssh in and kill the X process.

I got a nVidia card to make Maya easier to work with. Time to end this experiment I think.

Re:

[darkjedi521 (744526)]

If you're running Maya, would should be running the drivers/distro that Autodesk blesses. Last I checked, that was 2-3 year old drivers on RHEL 4/SLES 9/Fedora Core 5. I run the blessed packages for a small animation studio and only have problems when people out of memory their system (8GB RAM should be enough for anybody). http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?siteID=123112&id=9683256 [autodesk.com] has the list of blessed stuff.

OpenGL?

[LingNoi (1066278)]

This is serious question, I heard a while back that Vista had done something to make OpenGL slower.

Could Vista's bad performance be due to its nerfing of OpenGL on Vista in order to get developers to pick DX?

Re:OpenGL?

[zappepcs (820751)]

While I tend to agree with you, it would be stupid on the part of MS to hobble openGL because it will only make Windows look sucky. The news for nerds crowd on the Internet (not just /.) will ensure that *ANY* Linux drivers get vicarious face time with the masses and hobbling that experience is like a huge marketing blunder on the scale of the Sony rootkit without so much of the legal problems.

One thing that I like, recently it is not a case of Linux and Solaris having to be as good as MS, but a case of hmmm lets just see which performs better without the a priori conclusion that everyone has to keep up with MS.

I think that very soon, if not now, we can start thinking of MS as an angel with a tarnished halo, if I can put it so gently?

We are slowly moving in to an era of REAL competition, where all OSs are competing for the leading edge and the masses waiting for news each quarter of who is winning rather than everyone not really caring since no other OS is as good as MS. At that point, I think you can clearly and safely declare a win for F/OSS. A battle win if not the war.

Re:OpenGL?

[glob (23034)]

http://www.opengl.org/pipeline/article/vol003_9/ [opengl.org]

"Some have suggested that OpenGL performance on Windows Vista is poor compared to Windows XP. This is not the case."

Re:

[LingNoi (1066278)]

Yet, this graph [67.15.50.109] from that page shows Vista performance to be slightly worse and if you compare that graph to the data from this article then Windows XP must really suck as well.

Re:

[Svartalf (2997)]

Considering that the workstation app crowd are, in many cases, still using immediate mode OpenGL calls...

Do you honestly think that this is going to make things work to make them change things?

It has more to do with it's interrupt handling, etc. than anything else. Vista doesn't do so hot, even with
DirectX, because it's been rewritten in a few ways that don't help them any.

Doesn't Vista have a new driver model?

[tjstork (137384)]

I thought the whole deal with Vista is that it has a new driver model. Thus, its going to be some time before drivers can really be completely optimized for it.

Re:Doesn't Vista have a new driver model?

[figleaf (672550)]

Its an OpenGL test. The perf. difference between OpenGL and DirectX Nvidia implementations has always very large -- even in Windows XP.

Re:

[TheNetAvenger (624455)]

Not really, OpenGL and DirectX have always been more than competitive.

Also OpenGL technically benefits MORE from the new WDDM in Vista because of the RAM allocation system and GPU scheduling as the OS handles all these details for OpenGL and OpenGL applications.

The ICD still has to be optimized to pass through and work with the new Vista WDDM model, so as Vista was first released to now, just like with DirectX - OpenGL on current drivers is considerably faster than the horrid RTM drivers from both NVidia an

No XP?

[sleeponthemic (1253494)]

If you're a quattro user, your OS choice would surely be on software available for whatever particular professional application you are using the card for. As a sound designer, that would be for me, XP. I don't think many professionals are ready to jump to vista quite yet so I'm surprised that they have not included it. We are, after all, looking for stability.

Just wait - windows graphic will reclain the crown

[skeptictank (841287)]

I have it on good authority that the next Windows Driver Model will run Crysis on 3 SLI 8800GTs and render it in 8-bit color at 640x480 resolution at over 50 FPS! So take that you Linux/Unix hippy beatnik freaks!

Re:

[JoeCommodore (567479)]

I... Am... utterly amazed - by your brilliance!

I can tell we are conversing with the elite of computer wisdom here. AC, if you read your replies, what sort of experience do you have in um.. education, or the job market?

Re:

[SanityInAnarchy (655584)]

The only fucking games on communist linsux are lamr puzzles and a yahtzee clone thatcan't fucking randomize properly.

Maybe you've heard of a little game studio called Id Software [idsoftware.com]? Or Epic Games [epicgames.com]? I'm not even going to mention what works on Wine.

Whie we're at it, where are the professional 3D applications?

Oh, I don't know, Maya [autodesk.com]? That's off the top of my head -- I don't do 3D professionally.

But while we're at it, why did you bring up games in what is clearly an article about professional graphic design har

Re:Headline is misleading!

[kklein (900361)]

I read Slashdot every day, and until this moment I had never even heard of PCLinuxOS. I had to look it up.

Ubuntu, however... Ubuntu, my parents have heard of.

Don't know what metric Distrowatch uses, but it seems to be flawed.

Granted, I don't use Linux as a day-to-day OS, but I have some Linux apps I like which I run via Ubuntu in VMware Fusion. As a casual user, of the distros I've tried, Ubuntu wins hands-down. It's still too hard to set up for my parents, say, but not so hard that I don't just say "fsck it" and delete the partition, as I have done with all the others.

Re:

[Svartalf (2997)]

Uh... Dude? Did you even RTFA? (No, that'd presume too much- it is Slashdot, after all...)

Ubuntu PASTED Vista, and fared really good against Solaris, even when it was beaten by it.

Reality is, this largely has nothing to do with whatever Distro you care to favor- it's that an out
of the box Linux distribution pretty much pasted an out of the box Vista install.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

Re:Headline is misleading!

[kc8apf (89233)]

That's interesting. Considering that I am a developer for the CHUD Tool (no quotes) and I do performance analysis and benchmarking for a living, I don't think they did anything wrong. Things that aren't running on a system rarely affect run-time performance. Going from a distribution like Ubuntu to Debian just removes a bunch of things from disk, but those things have zero impact on the metric being measured. For Vista, it might make a difference if the version used was shown to have less idle activity, but in practice, you want to compare what a typical user would be running. So, since the OSs chosen reflect typical users, the data is perfectly valid for a comparison between them. If you want absolute performance numbers, then you need to start tuning the OSs before you run the tests. Things like disabling daemons or services and unplugging network cables can cause measurable differences in some benchmarks.

As for the CHUD Tools, they are completely inert unless you happen to be running one of the tools and even then, it isn't likely to cause any significant difference. The kernel extensions used by the CHUD Tools are designed to do absolutely nothing until they are asked to. If you are running a Time Profile in Shark, it will have some impact, but it will be limited to 1-2%.

Re:

[Ilgaz (86384)]

Matrox had their lesson trying to sell their excellent cards to gamers. Everyone came to forums and whined about seeing "30 fps" while their friends have "120 fps". Some sane people tried to tell the specs of human eye but it didn't matter.

I bet there are rich but non techie guys buying Quadro for gaming right now. I know a one bought ATI FireGL along with 15K RPM SCSI disk and couldn't sleep because of noise. Not just that ,his game got locked to 30 fps :)

Re:ws cards

[andersbergh (884714)]

There's definitely a different between say, 30 and 100 fps: http://100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm [100fps.com]

Re:

[TheLink (130905)]

You might not be able to tell the difference between 30fps and 120 fps. I can (and I'm not superhuman). I probably can't tell the difference between 85 and 100, but I've been playing games long enough to know there's a perceptible difference between 30fps and 60fps. 30fps is just "playable", >= 60fps = "good.

Just find a game, play it at a low FPS and then compare it at a high FPS. I used to play Doom and Doom 2, and believe me in many cases low res high FPS was better than high res low FPS. Plenty of oth

Re:

[batkiwi (137781)]

This is an openGL test. Nvidia's linux drivers for openGL have been really fast for a long time now. In fact they've confirmed that they use the same driver code for windows and linux, just with a different API exposed.

What you're talking about is that the video acceleration APIs are not exposed for linux (purevideo). This is still the case, and annoying.

Re:

[dbIII (701233)]

There has been hardware rescaling to TV modes on their cards for a few years so you'll find the cheapest models with TV-out do a good job. Other features have improved a lot in the linux and other drivers - look at the README on the nvidia download site for the long list and how to turn some on or off.