Linux + KDE Delivers Better NVIDIA Performance than Windows

[Rob Williams]

Back in August, Valve made a blog post showing off Left 4 Dead performance between Windows and Linux, and surprisingly, Linux came out ahead. Following-up with more elaborate testing is Phoronix, which has found that across the board, Linux's NVIDIA driver delivers better performance than Windows', using the same benchmarks. But there's something else that was discovered: Unity is slower than KDE, and as such, KDE will offer the best NVIDIA experience.

Read the rest of our post and then discuss it here!

 

[Tharic-Nar]

Some odd numbers there for sure... Unity is slower than Windows by quite a margin on a 460, but slightly faster with a 680. I guess the drivers make use of the improved architecture and tune accordingly. Bit of a shame if I'm honest, it probably means that older generation cards are likely to be in a much worse position for rendering under Unity than they should be.

Could it be the Fermi mode switching the older cards did when working with 3D and Compute?