NVIDIA GeForce 8: Linux vs. Windows

When it comes to binary display drivers under Linux, NVIDIA is generally known as the company that’s able to offer drivers that are on par with their Windows driver. Unlike the known performance issues with the ATI/AMD fglrx driver where it’s not uncommon for the driver to be 50% slower than the Windows Catalyst equivalent, the NVIDIA Linux driver has performed roughly the same if not faster in some cases. This has also been true for the NVIDIA Solaris driver as the performance bastion can largely be attributed to the shared driver code-base between all NVIDIA-supported platforms (Windows, Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD). However, with the GeForce 8 series we have come across some unusual issues that are limiting the performance of the GeForce 8 series under Linux and Solaris. In this article, we have additional information on these austere performance problems along with benchmarks showing the frame-rate differences between Windows XP and Linux.