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]

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

Surprised..

[LingNoi]

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. ^_^

OpenGL?

[LingNoi]

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]

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:Surprised..

[Svartalf]

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:Headline is misleading!

[Svartalf]

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:the difference does not matter.

[blantonl]

Then "open source marketing" will fix that.. and don't think that marketing can't be open sourced - someone will innovate and figure that problem out.

Re:the difference does not matter.

[bigpicture]

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:the difference does not matter.

[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:Surprised..

[vux984]

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.

Hmmm...curious

[mzeb]

Well ok, let's be careful here. Ubuntu as a whole performs better than Vista according to the article. But it leaves out a little too much "why" for me. I don't want to say "the driver is faster" because there is a lot more in the underlying OS for all three OSs. Also, I want to see Fedora, Suse and Debian. If you do the search for "Mainstream, Intel Compatible" Linux OSs on linux.org (the first hit in google) Ubuntu doesn't even show up. How can you expect a standard gamer to even find the OS except by knowing a Linux geek. Ubuntu is still to niche to run a "real live" scenario test on. Use debian or fedora and you'll be more likely to hit what a normal user would use.

Re:But Microsoft is not GM

[AJWM]

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:ws cards

[TheLink]

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 other games allow you to lock the fps, and unlock the fps etc. If you can't tell the difference, well good for you and bad for you, good = you don't need to spend so much on graphics cards, bad = your eyes are probably below average in that.

33ms is a substantial amount of time for games. Even though the picture gets "smeared" in the time domain due to the way eyes work, there's a difference if you are seeing some stuff 25ms later, because it's just "not time to show the frame yet".

Stereo 3D Support Is One

[maz2331]

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:Why does it fucking matter anyways?

[SanityInAnarchy]

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 hardware? Or do you actually buy Quadro cards and wonder why your games run like shit?

I am not talkin about the gpl3 shit

Like what? Closest I can think of is blender [blender.org], which is under the GPLv2. Is that what you're not talking about?

BTW, great initals, Richard stallman=RMS Titanic

Yeah, because that was totally unique to the Titanic. Except it wasn't -- it actually stands for "Royal Mail Ship [wikipedia.org]".

Then you wonder why you can't get a fucking job

I'm doing nicely [amazon.com], thank you.

Never suspected it was the Windows fanbois living in their mother's basements all along, though. Thanks for that, you just made my day.

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

[TheNetAvenger]

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 and ATI for Vista.

Right now in MOST circumstances, even games running in an Aero Window, they are running faster under Vista than XP, no matter if they are OpenGL or DirectX.

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

One game a technician here plays is City of Heroes, that is a hybrid DirectX/OpenGL application (see NCSoft for more details), the tech runs the game inside a Window with Aero active, as it is 10% faster than running it full screen, which turns off Aero's composer. Why the improved performance with Aero is unknown, but measurable and a testament to the speed of how Aero is implemented with the shared device context and texture methods it uses instead of dual memory or double buffering like you find with Linux or OS X.

I personally have more regard for DirectX because of being involved with SGI and the 90s OpenGL specifications, where MS couldn't force the OpenGL participants to move to 3d Hardware gaming type constructs, even after writing a few test specifications for OpenGL. If OpenGL would have had a better view of the future, there would have NEVER been DirectX as MS wanted to be a big OpenGL proponent.

I think OpenGL shot themselves and a lot of users in the head with their closed minded moves, and if it hadn't been for the gaming movement of Linux when 3D acceleration was becoming a normal aspect of computing, OpenGL to this day might have disappeared or remained a 'high brow' 3D specification that didn't want to dirty their hands with more direct 3D hardware support or features condusive to gaming.

Anyway, check out the link, there are several posted about OpenGL performance on Vista in the past few months comparing both it and DirectX to various situations and XP, showing that the rewriting and optimizataion of the Vista drivers fro NVidia and ATI for the past few months are finally as mature as the XP drivers. (Which isn't too bad considering they were written from scratch late 2006, with no real world performance or game profiling optimizations that the XP drivers had built on for years.)

Here is another thread a tech here has been following and forwarded to me this morning, since I was reading it right before I flipped to SlashDot, I thought I might as well include it as well, not a concrete study or test, but more of what users are experiencing to their surprise after all the negative Vista vs XP press:

http://futuremark.yougamers.com/forum/showthread.php?t=72298 [yougamers.com]