C vs Perl | Perl vs Python | POGL vs SDL | Windows vs Linux |

This is a capture of POGL's test app (test.pl), demonstrating:

* Vertex and Fragment Shader 1 - to create the metallic wireframe teapot

* Frame Buffer Objects (FBO) - render the teapot to a GPU texture

* Vextex Buffer Objects (VBO) - to define the cube and animate surface colors POGL Benchmarks - Windows vs Linux

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This is a quick benchmark based on POGL's test.pl test app, which demonstrates the use of animated FBOs and a fragment shader.

Platforms

These benchmarks were performed on the same multi-boot system:

  • 3Ghz Intel Pentium D
  • 1G Memory
  • nVidia GeForce 6800 GT/AGP/SSE2
  • Matched nVidia drivers (as of March, 15, 2007):
    • Linux: v97.55
    • Vista: v100.65

These benchmarks require Perl, an OpenGL installation, GLUT and POGL.

Tests were performed using POGL's test.pl test app, with Inset (glRead/DrawPixels) disabled and FBO enabled (1 = static texture, 2 = animated texture).

These tests were also run on a similar XP system, with similar results; however, since it was not possible to install XP after Vista and Linux were already installed on this benchmark system, those results were not included in this report.

Summary

While Windows and Linux generally perform equally well for most applications (Apache, MySQL, Perl, etc), this is not the case for OpenGL.

These results show that Linux performs up to 10X faster than Windows (Vista).

Operating system Static FBO fps Animated FBO fps
Ubuntu (Dapper) 1085 152
Fedora 6 768 145
Vista Ultimate 73 48

Analysis

To eliminate the possibility that Vista was running in software mode, nVidia's nvemulate utility was used to force emulation mode - resulting in about 2 fps... which is significantly slower than these benchmark results.

Tests were performed on Vista with and without composition-mode enabled, with no change in performance.

The following informative article provides some background on Vista OpenGL performance considerations: http://www.opengl.org/pipeline/article/vol003_7.

Note: test.pl includes text rendering - as a result, fonts and font engines may have impacted these numbers... which may explain the disparity between Ubuntu and Fedora (which are using the same nVidia driver).

Nor does this test exclude the possibility that the POGL module might run slower on Windows.

A subsequent benchmark comparing C vs Perl has been posted on this site - which eliminates fonts and POGL as performance factors.

Downloads

You can run these benchmarks by installing POGL