Windows 7, Mac OS X, and Ubuntu 10.04 meet up for an OpenGL benchmarking session
By Vlad Savov 
posted May 12th 2010 4:09AM
posted May 12th 2010 4:09AM
posted May 12th 2010 4:09AM
Canonical Ubuntu 10.04
Apple Mac OS X Snow Leopard
Canonical Ubuntu 12.04
Microsoft Windows 7
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So, I remember all the criticisms about Vista/Win7 implementation of OpenGL, and that OSX and Linux would be much superior because their implementation is 'native' and stuff. It so turns out that Windows remains the best in the fields that the other two claim to be superior. And DirectX11 is even better than OpenGL. For those that claim that OSX and Linux drivers are subpar: the fact is that MS has been battling for more years to have windows and games run in subpar hardware. They simply have more experience in this and it is logical that this translates in better performance in same hardware as compared with other OSs, who simply did not care about running games in low cost hardware.
@ckeledjian
Exactly... Apple ha sonly just woken up to the money they can get off gaming.
Trust once the steam picks up and the benchmarks keep rolling out they will do something to fix this.
Though admittedly you shouldnt really bother with gaming on mac as the GPU's are always going to be underclocked for the sake of thinness :(
It's official... Mac OS sucks at gaming. No wonder Mac gaming never took off.
Is this a valid test, what your testing here is the OpenGL driver, which differs from system to system, card to card and is written by the GFX manufacturer not the O.S. developer.
@bigsofty
Erm Apple is responsible for graphics drivers for OS X as well as the OpenGL implementation.
@bigsofty
It doesn't matter where you try to point fingers. The numbers speak for themselves.
OTOH, with Windows and Linux you at least have the option of trying newer video hardware or a box that is beefed up in other ways. You don't need to restrict yourself something that's a clone of some cheapish Apple configuration.
@bigsofty
Yes it is. Why are people trying to take this out of context?
Simply put, this benchmarking session found that Windows 7 is best for gaming using the current versions of the different software. Windows won this time as it is better, in the future this may not be the case but its fair because that is all it was trying to test.
If they did the same test in two weeks and OSX comes out on top you will claim the drivers are part of OSX and thus OSX is simply better. Stop trying to bend facts
@bigsofty
Yes. Perfectly valid. Apple not winning is not a cheat.
Apple got third place in the race, where every practical measure was made to keep it as fair as possible.
If the Windows test had been done with DirectX, then you might have had a point.
But this is just whining because Apple came third again.
@bigsofty
Is ur name irl Nathan?
Ubuntu is using a very new release of Xorg and as of yet it hasnt been tuned much, there are some massive changes in the latest release so the fact it is slower is no surprise to me.
Um, where's the source for this? Damned if I can find the link to the graph.
@Kelmon
click on "source: phoronix"
@Proud Japanese
Cheers for that - it's not the most obvious link, even by Engadget standards.
On topic, is it me or does anyone else think its odd that in quite a few benchmarks (e.g. UrbanTerror and Nexuiz) that the Mac OS X benchmarks improve as the resolution increases, rather than following the usual sloping curve? I'm not reading too much into this but it seems to "hit its stride" at 1280 x 1024, which just seems weird to me.
I don't know what this post says, nor can I find a link to the original article.
Its too clever.
Which one is faster?
@netsql
click on "source: phoronix"
The fact that Ubuntu which is freely given, made by a company with 200 employees and has never had a gaming focus came in largely second is freaking amazing.
@yomachaser
i never thought of it that way, they really deserve a lot of praise for this.
@yomachaser
Wile they may have few employees (Canonical actually has over 300 employees) they certainly aren't responsible for everything in Ubuntu. There are thousands and thousands of people who have been developing Linux for over 40 years.
@Missing Matter Never tried to imply that ,but the truth is Canonical has put a hell of a lot of work into making Ubuntu an out of box competitor to the big two and there are tons of other distros (which I love) that aren't geared to compete for the regular user this well.
apple is going to release its on new graphic standard for apples only lol no 1 will be able to compete with them html5 and the new standard lol.... they cant compete so they make their customers suffer so they can try and compete... communist.... like the little noob you keep killing on mw2 and he keeps coming back and he finally kills you but he used all his flash bangs to kill you.
The funniest thing is not the Windows 7 victory.
If we consider that the OSX drivers are developed in a close work between Apple and Nvidia, and the Ubuntu drivers are "subpar because they just aim for the workstation market", please tell me:
How Ubuntu won over OSX almost every time?
Well, I dunno about Ubuntu, but graphics drivers on OS X aren't exactly great. Heard they are going to address it in 10.6.4.
Oh well.
From the article.. "With every OpenGL gaming test and at every tested resolution, Microsoft Windows 7 x64 was significantly faster than Mac OS X 10.6.3 on Apple's very own hardware"
Wow, Steve Jobs must be adding more "control keys" to iMacs
Of course Mac sucks at OpenGL...I've been saying this for years.
I guess they're pissed off they don't own the IP for the technology and support it half-assedly like everything else they didn't create. Fucking apple.
Woooo Go Snow Leopard
The source website constantly crashes my Internet Explorer 8 tab. (I wouldn't be using IE8 if I didn't have to.) I guess I'll have to wait until lunch to read this one.
um, im sorry, its "early days"? they where testing a quake3 for gods sake! early days.... its an 11 year old engine!
and the steam games are based hl2 engine, how old is that? 7 years? yeah, really cutting edge :)
lets all keep hoping "things improve for the rest of us in rapid fashion", just like you've done the last ten years, and will probably still do the next 10 ;)
As I said in a comment on a different thread I am waiting for the day - not too far off - when mac users start playing steam games and the performance sucks compared to their friends PCs and they start bitching about the bad coding of the source engine...like they do about flash...
face it - OSX just isn't as good as windows.
system versus ... or how to start the flamewar
which is only about
how the ones can justify owning only one gaming system
while the others try to say that we should take their opinion seriously, given the fact that they own several gaming systems.
This is officially my favorite post on Engadget. I love hearing all the Apple fan boys whine and cry and make up excuses. How do you get beaten by Linux... honestly... its not like Ubuntu charges for their OS. And they definitely don't charge as much as the over priced as hell Macs you idiots buy. This seriously has made my day. I hope all you Apple communists start realizing the mistake of your ways. And you all say driver issues. You think any Linux build out there gets any special consideration from companies that are making drivers? I think not. Good luck continuing to support the worst thing that has ever happened to the computer world.
Oh and just as an offset I do support what the iPhone has done for the cell phone market. I love my new HTC Incredible and reaping the benefits of all the cool features this phone has because the iPhone pushed the market hahaha. Just sucks I do what the iPhone does now but better. Apple should just do cell phones and maybe mp3 players.
People still use OpenGL?
Buck Fush!
OS Engineers have been trying to educate people for years that the NT kernel model is far more robust and efficient than is given credit.
The extensibility of the object based NT kernel model is what has allowed Microsoft to easily use both XPDM and WDDM at low levels and concurrently within one OS model as the kernel is agnostic to the upper video layers.
XPDM shoved driver code at a very low level to get performance out of hardware, and WDDM uses a cross driver that mainly runs in User but gets some kernel level bypasses for performance.
What the WDDM gives applications using DirectX or OpenGL is an OS level GPU scheduler that manages the GPU instead of the application yeilding method that traditional OpenGL only offers.
The side effects of doing this are keeping the OS responsive no matter what or how many 3D or GPU accessing applicaitons are running, as the OS is the arbiter for multi-tasking.
It also allows the OS to use performance tricks/enhancements to offer to the applications by using the PCI specifications of handing system RAM out to the GPU as native GPU VRAM at the OS/driver level, thus letting games use much richer and larger textures on Video cards with smaller amounts of VRAM.
So OpenGL, DirectX, and even direct GPU library computing technologies all get a boost from the WDDM in Vista and Win7 because the OS ensures the GPU can't be locked and it is handled these instructions as performance demands without the 3D Aero becoming sluggish even though it is using the same GPU at the same time. (OS level GPU multi-tasking is a good thing.)
And the reasons why, go on and on, and are what the OS engineers that studied Vista and even the XBox 360 could have told you back in 2006 of why the XBox design would still be producing high quality HD quality games and the Windows platform would offer the best performance in gaming.
If you gave me the option of 10,000 great OSS developers OR 100 of the top R&D developers, I would always choose the 100 top designers, which is also what Microsoft does.
PS. People forget that unlike the OSS and even Apple developers, Microsoft has engineers designing GPU and CPU technology, as they are behind some of the PS/VS technologies of the Geforce FX generation that was also in the orginal XBox and are also behind the unified shader technology in the XBox 360 and all newer PC GPU designes from ATi and NVidia.
(Even if the XBox or XBox 360 had been a consumer 'fail', the technology and concepts they learned from tight performance on hardware has benefited the Windows platform greatly.)
eff steam
Features for the next release of bootcamp:
Reduce Windows performance
Windows has been the OS of choice when wanting to take advantage of the full power of the GPU, whether using OpenGL, or DirectX, or any other kind of GPU compute.
It's really no surprise they retain this crown. I would go so far as to argue Windows has more powerful APIs to take advantage of graphics cards than any other OS on the market. *Nix distros included.