Mac OS X v. Windows 7 v. Ubuntu 10.04

[RoyGBiv]

Phoronix has recently begun a series of benchmark tests comparing Windows 7, Ubuntu 10.04, and, when possible, Mac OS X 10.6.3.



Platform allowing a side-by-side comparison of all three:

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo CPU P7350 @ 2.00GHz (Total Cores: 2), Motherboard: Apple Mac-F22C86C8, Chipset: nVidia MCP79, Memory: 1 x 1 GB DDR3-1067MHz, Disk: 120GB FUJITSU MHZ2120B, Graphics: nVidia C79 512MB (450MHz), Audio: Realtek ALC889A, Monitor: DELL S2409W

Using this test platform, they came to the following, general conclusions regarding graphics/gaming performance involving OpenGL:

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. In many cases, Windows 7 produced noticeably higher frame-rates than even Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx", which was somewhat surprising considering the competitive performance last week in our Windows vs. Ubuntu Linux performance comparison.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_windows_part3&num=1

I'm a little bit shocked at this. I would not have expected Windows to out-perform Mac on Apple's own hardware.

What's interesting for those of us who use Linux is that Ubuntu 10.04 is comparable to Windows and will likely run the Steam engine well.

[lazarus]

1. Interesting

Win7 is where they finally got it right, IMO. Very good OS. My daughter's running Ubuntu, and she likes it a lot, but that's comparing it to Vista.

[RoyGBiv]

2. I don't hate Windows 7 ...

... and that's saying something coming from me. As I've mentioned elsewhere, it still incorporates elements I will never stop criticizing, but they don't actually have a lot to do with the technical aspects of the system. My problems have more to do with Microsoft as a company.

In any case, these results still surprised me. Apple's whole technical model is built around the idea of a marriage of software and hardware so that they worked near to perfection together. This is the basic logic (one level of it for mass consumption anyway) behind how closed its system is. One would think that its very own operating system would function better than one alien to the hardware, but at least with these tests, that's not what happened.

Strange.

FWIW, in the previous tests on a platform with better, gaming centered hardware, Windows 7 and Ubuntu were pitted against each other, and while Windows came out ahead overall, Ubuntu was better in some of the tests and remained close in all of them, at least when using the NVidia and ATI proprietary drivers. (The open-source versions of these drivers still have work to be done, and the Intel Linux driver remains horrendous.) Overall, though, the Linux system tested well and at least was close in gaming performance to the Windows system. This shows clear advances over the last couple years.

More practical (non-gaming) tasks will be benchmarked in the near future. It will be interesting to see the results.

[Dont_Bogart_the_Pretzel]

3. Apple's own hardware? Really?...

Too bad they can't run these tests using AMD Motherboards.... since Apple's own hardware is Intel ONLY.

[Egnever]

4. wow on macs own hardware

how embarrassing

[EvolveOrConvolve]

5. It's interesting that the Ubuntu line in the graph stays flat

Meaning its performance is probably more software based than hardware based. If Ubuntu had the sheer number of engineers working on it that Microsoft has working on Windows 7, I'm sure the performance would easily surpass Windows.

I'm not surprised at Apple's performance, however. The company is moving away from a focus on desktop computers and they're creating and dominating other markets. Steve Jobs was smart enough to understand that he got his ass kicked by Microsoft in the desktop computing game, so he moved Apple to greener pastures.