Catalyst On Ubuntu 14.04 Linux Competes Well With Windows 8.1
While Nexuiz is a now defunct open-source game, it's still an interesting test as we've used it for years and in past Windows vs. Linux comparisons the performance has been close to the same when using the proprietary drivers. With this Catalyst 14.4 testing under Ubuntu and Windows 8.1, the results are a bit different from normal. With the older Radeon HD 5000 and 6000 series graphics cards, Windows 8.1 was faster than Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. However, with the newer graphics cards like the Radeon HD 7950 and Rx 200 series, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS was running faster than Windows 8.1.
With OpenArena 0.8.8, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with Catalyst 14.4 was running faster than Windows 8.1 with its Catalyst 14.4 release. While all of the tested graphics cards were easily delivering playable frame-rates, Ubuntu had the noticeable lead on the OpenGL performance for this old OpenGL game.
When running the demanding Unigine Heaven benchmark with OpenGL on both platforms, the performance was close to the same speed for all tested graphics cards, except for the Radeon R9 290 Hawaii graphics card where it was unstable on Catalyst 14.4 and were unable to get a successful run for the graphics card on Windows 8.1 but it had run without faults on Ubuntu 14.04.