Ubuntu is the worst at 3D peformance? Presumably worst for gaming and 3D movies?

[Syndicalist]

http://jeffhoogland.blogspot.com/2010/09/best-linux-distro-for-3d-performance.html


This was interesting. Thoughts?

[sffvba[e0rt]

The only thought I have seeing as I didn't read any further was that this article is a year old and in technology time means it is ancient...


404

[Syndicalist]

Maybe, but as it stands it performed the aboslute worst of any distro. I am not about to assume this was fixed until evidence suggests otherwise.

Ubuntu does not seem to be a safe bet for 3D support or gaming.


Mint Debian and Sabayon both scored impressively and drastically better.

[Shining Arcanine]

Maybe, but as it stands it performed the aboslute worst of any distro. I am not about to assume this was fixed until evidence suggests otherwise.

Ubuntu does not seem to be a safe bet for 3D support or gaming.


Mint Debian and Sabayon both scored impressively and drastically better.

The results are even more surprising considering that the version of the Nvidia drivers was the same for all distributions tested. I have no idea why Ubuntu did so badly.

[Thewhistlingwind]

> Implying that 3D movies actually require any more computational intensity then other types of movie.

/thread.

[jwbrase]

Maybe, but as it stands it performed the aboslute worst of any distro. I am not about to assume this was fixed until evidence suggests otherwise.

Ubuntu does not seem to be a safe bet for 3D support or gaming.


Mint Debian and Sabayon both scored impressively and drastically better.

By around 10%. Note that the graphs didn't start at zero, so the difference looks bigger than it is.

I'd hardly say it isn't a safe bet for 3D support or gaming. From actually having tried gaming on it, I find that its performance is respectable, even if short of the rest of the pack.

[HoKaze]

It should be noted that in terms of actual numbers Ubuntu only did ~10% worse, the tests were only done on one hardware configuration and whilst there was a good selection of distros there, it's unfair to say that Ubuntu is the worst at 3D performance. Out of the distros tested at the time with that specific hardware? Yes. With all hardware? Maybe not. Are there other distros with worse 3D support? Countless.

Not that I'm saying I don't trust the results but this is a very limited test setup and is out of date. It's hardly a fair test. What is interesting to note, however, is whether or not 32-bit or 64-bit distros were used. If the 32-bit ones were used, the fact that the results are so close is unusual as if I recall correctly, some distros on that list (such as the Arch-based Chakra) optimise their binaries for i686 rather than i386 or i486 like Ubuntu does. I may be wrong on that though but all the same, might be worth noting.
Likewise, Fedora seems to do noticeably worse than the other distros, if not to the same extent as Ubuntu. This is unusual as I was under the impression that Fedora tended to use fairly leading edge packages. Likewise, we can attribute Ubuntu's lower performance to the fact that the distro tends to use older mesa packages but you'd have though other distros aiming towards stability over performance would also share the same issue.

A final note is that even if this was a test carried out recently with a wider range of distros across a wide variety of hardware, I don't think a 10% difference is really all that significant. If you're getting a solid 60 fps on say, Chakra, is 54 fps on Ubuntu really that much worse?

[SirDrexl]

> Implying that 3D movies actually require any more computational intensity then other types of movie.

/thread.

They don't? True 3D movies on BD have two video streams to decode instead of one. Although, these tests weren't relevant to any kind of movie playback.

[Syndicalist]

11.4% is significant enough to feel the difference. Coders and typists don't care, but gamers do. Gamers spend hundreds of dollars for 3% boosts.....Linux gamers are not a huge market, but we are entering an era of 3d video that is going to need support. More and more people are recording their family events in 3d. I would notice a 10% drop in FPS.


Granted, its a lot smaller of a difference than it looked....however, in my experience Unity is DRAGGING......I would be willing to bet money that its WORSE now with unity, not better.


However, it should be worth pointing out that its not JUST the difference in desktop environment that is to blame since these were under a more or less even playing field with the same DE and kernel and drivers.


This probably wont affect your programmers or office workers....just gamers and media junkies.

[NightwishFan]

As was said this is very misleading. I highly doubt the performance is lower in Ubuntu (and I don't even particularly like Ubuntu any more, I am just being honest).

I would like to see reasons for this.

[ninjaaron]

Granted, its a lot smaller of a difference than it looked....however, in my experience Unity is DRAGGING......I would be willing to bet money that its WORSE now with unity, not better.

It's fast on my netbook.:p

[Syndicalist]

As was said this is very misleading. I highly doubt the performance is lower in Ubuntu (and I don't even particularly like Ubuntu any more, I am just being honest).

I would like to see reasons for this.


I would think it comes down to simple bloat. The other distros are noticeably snappier, even on new hardware.

[NightwishFan]

I would think it comes down to simple bloat. The other distros are noticeably snappier, even on new hardware.

No, there is nothing wrong with Ubuntu. They probably left compiz enabled or something and that is why the 3d benchmark was 10% lower.

[BrokenKingpin]

I play a lot of 3d games on my Ubuntu machines and they run just fine. I also enables compositing/3d effects in my window manager, and even on my low powered netbook it runs fine.

A lot of change has happened since 10.10, so I think new benchmarks would be required before freaking out.

[Thewhistlingwind]

They don't? True 3D movies on BD have two video streams to decode instead of one. Although, these tests weren't relevant to any kind of movie playback.

I thought it was one. I was thinking along the lines of cheesy 3D you get on old 90's movies.

It wouldn't surprise me if the technology has improved/I'm wrong.

Of course, I highly doubt they need real 3D rendering.

[3Miro]

I have hard time accepting the results here, there may be something else happening.

I have a GTX260 at home, I will run Heaven Benchamark tonight. In general, I think there may have been something else wrong with the system, I have not see any difference between Ubuntu and other distros in terms of 3D gaming (and I do use wine a lot).

[kaldor]

No, there is nothing wrong with Ubuntu. They probably left compiz enabled or something and that is why the 3d benchmark was 10% lower.

When I ran Debian, I got the same performance as I did on Ubuntu. When I ran Sabayon, I got slightly better performance overall on Flash, gaming, etc. That said, it's pretty much negligible.

There are also different software versions.

[Sef]

Locked. Article is out of date and only applies to an Ubuntu version that has less than 2 months of support left on it. Unless this test is rerun with newer software, how it runs on the current software is unknown.