Quake 3 on Linux outperforms Windows XP

[RichL]

Taken from - http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/23735.html

One Intel D850MVSE mobo with Northwood P4; 512M PC800 RDRAM; two Maxtor D740X 20G ATA-133 drives on the mobo's onboard ATA-100 controller, one booting Win-XP Pro on FAT and one booting SuSE 7.3 Pro on ReiserFS and both installed clean and subsequently patched; and a 64M DDR GeForce AGP4.

The Windows drive is patched with whatever the MS auto-update cloak-and-dagger process does to it. The Linux drive is patched to kernel 2.4.17. The video and OpenGL drivers for both OS's were upgraded with the most recent files from Nvidia's Web site.

On the Windows drive I installed all the Intel chipset drivers and the Application Accelerator. The Linux kernel is reasonably optimized for the HDD and the P4, but with APIC disabled, as it just won't run on the 850 mobo otherwise.

Mode: 1024x786
Color depth: 16-bit
Lighting: lightmap
Geometric detail: high
Texture Detail: maximum
Texture quality: 16-bit
Filter: trilinear

Win-XP returned an average of 72.7 FPS, which is worse than I'd expect from a P3 800 on '98 with about 128M RAM, or a 486DX 100 on Win 3.1 with about 16M RAM. (You see the pattern here....)

Linux returned an average of 80.2 FPS, which is significantly better, though hardly brilliant. But let's keep in mind that the system I'm using here is virtually Linux-hostile. The next one won't be.

With even less detail, further reducing dependency on the graphics card, we got better numbers from the CPU. The breakdown was similar, though Windows narrowed the gap a bit.

Mode: 640x480
Color depth: 16-bit
Lighting: vertex
Geometric detail: low
Texture Detail: minimum
Texture quality: 16-bit
Filter: bilinear

This gave us averages of 272.2 FPS on Windows and 304.7 on Linux.

The author does seem rather anti-Microsoft, and The Register isnt noted as a hardware/software testing website, but still some interesting results.

But I expect someone will say he was smoking crack when doing the tests...

[TdB]

does this mean linux is a faster gaming-platform, or does it mean that nvidia can´t write winXP-drivers?

[Gurm]

Or does it mean that he has the wrong drivers installed, can't work them, or is just an all-round imbecile?

You know how much respect (none) I have for the Register (crack-smoking idiots).

- Gurm

[Kosh Naranek]

Originally posted by Gurm
Or does it mean that he has the wrong drivers installed, can't work them, or is just an all-round imbecile?

You know how much respect (none) I have for the Register (crack-smoking idiots).

- Gurm

I must admit I got a good laugh out of reading that story too.

I mean

• does he choose operating system based on how Q3 performs ?
• What hardware was it tested on ?
• Why did he only test Q3 and nothing else ?
• Can't Linux handle E-mail ?
• What drivers did he use ?
• Was he playing MOHAA while playing Q3 on the XP box ?
• Can't Linux handle E-mail ( I know already mentioned once )
• etc.

[Pace]

Do you think NTFS would affect XP performance in Q3?

Sometimes I run Q3 with Photoshop/Dreamweaver in the background, here are my results:

Windows 98/2000/XP - 50-55fps (at my resolution)
Linux - 0fps (Photoshop/Dreamweaver...hehe )

P.

[DosFreak]

*nix operates at a lower level to the hardware and the code is more optimized due to less device compatibility. *nix has pretty much always outperformed Windows in gaming at the lower resolutions. Now finally Nvidia is optimizing their drivers at higher resolutions. You won't see *nix exceed Windows at higher resolutions but at lower it will always be faster. Always.

I'm sure the minimum framerate at higher resolutions if compared between the 2 OS's *nix would be faster too.

[Pace]

Another point though, is who cares about this result?

I use Win2k at the moment, for plenty of reasons, fps in Q3 is not one of them. Neither is webserving performance. Generally, speed differences don't mean that much to me, unless it's 300%. So, I'm happy being a Windows user and gamer, until I can do what I want to do in Linux, as easy as I can in Windows (and that's not just setting up, but actually using the system, and creating end-results).

P.

PS: My 2002nd post. 3 weeks too late to be of major significance. Incidentally, my website counter hit 20,002 on the 1st. On with the show...

[TdB]

If someone really want to prove that linux is good for games, then benchmark with a wider range of games AND a wider range of graphic-cards.

Is it just me, or do most people equals gaming performance, with quake3 performance?

[PowerHungry]

Out of pure curiosity, does anyone know what other 3d graphics intensive games are there that run on the linux platform?

[Wombat]

Here ya go:

http://www.lokigames.com/products/

Then there are all the others that you can get to work with Wine.

[PowerHungry]

Thank you, Wombat.

[Wombat]

No problem. I also forgot to mention RtCW. Multiplayer and singleplayer are now out.