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Hey there folks!

Today I present to you another comparison video, this time around running Unigine's Heaven benchmark. The Heaven benchmark is very demanding on even the latest hardware, so I was interested to see how Ubuntu, a Linux distro, would handle the stress in comparison to Windows 8.
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The quality of the video is certainly not the best, but the Nikon AW100 is all I have to use at the moment. If you are not interested in watching the entire video, then you should pause at 4:57 to see the results side-by-side.

This test pushes both operating systems and their respective drivers, by running the benchmark at the following settings:

  • API - OpenGL
  • Quality - ULTRA
  • Tessellation - EXTREME
  • Resolution - 1920x1080


While tessellation is not brand spanking new anymore, it is still rather new to being in actual games. Thus, I figured this test would enlighten us as to how (at least in Unigine's case) tessellation performs on Ubuntu. For good measure and something to compare to, Windows was tested as well.

This test was also done on relatively some of the latest hardware available in the market, with the key components being:

CPU - Intel i7-4770 3.4GHz Haswell
GPU - Nvidia GTX680 GDDR5 2GB

Hopefully this time around I haven't made any glaring mistakes. No screen recorders were involved, and since this is a benchmark application the timing should be the same.

AMD and Intel graphics users may experience dramatically different results. If I can figure out how to enable only the 4600 graphics on this i7 CPU (without physically removing the 680), then hopefully I'll do some comparisons with this iGPU as well in the future.

As always, please help correct me if I made any mistakes and advice is always welcome. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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11 comments

Anonymous Oct 2, 2013
Much better then the last, just a hint, write down your complete system and used driverversions :)
scaine Oct 2, 2013
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Loved that video. You're using almost exactly my system to do the test too (processor, graphics card), so it's pretty depressing to think that the highest quality setting on Unigine can pretty much cripple my system!

I may have to download that benchmark and give it a try though! Is it freely available, or a purchase?

Great video - well done.
ThePartisan Oct 2, 2013
I may have to download that benchmark and give it a try though! Is it freely available, or a purchase?


It's free -> http://unigine.com/products/heaven/download/

I would like to see how much Linux ATI drivers are behind Windows.
Sabun Oct 2, 2013
Yep, like sgtGarcia says, it's free! Give it a go, it's always fun to see how your system handles current graphics workloads.

I would like to see how much Linux ATI drivers are behind Windows.
I'm curious too. I wonder if AMD will push it's Linux driver forward with the release of it's new cards, or will it do the usual and take it slow.
Lord Avallon Oct 2, 2013
Congratulations again Sabun, very nice video! Well, at least with NVidia, nobody can say Windows performance is much better than Ubuntu, parity was achieved and now we have games, we are on the right track.
Sabun Oct 2, 2013
Thank you Lord Avallon, I'm grateful for the kind words :D
DrMcCoy Oct 2, 2013
It's free
Only as in beer, though.
Chewy Oct 2, 2013
To force Intel integrated graphics, there should be an option in the BIOS.  It's usually called something like "Primary Video Adapter".  The available settings should be Auto (this selects external graphics if present, then falls back to integrated), Integrated/iGPU/IGD, or External/PCIe/PEG.  If you select Internal, and use one of the video outputs on the motherboard instead of the external GPU, then you will be running on the Intel integrated graphics, without the external GPU affecting anything.
Anonymous Oct 2, 2013
Unfortunately, if you run there newest test Unigine Valley https://unigine.com/products/valley/ 
you will find that Linux falls very short of performance on Windows currently.  But yeah the old Unigine Heaven actually performs better on my system in Linux than windows.
FutureSuture Oct 2, 2013
Thank you very much for this video! You do them very well, Sabun, so please continue your good work. There's also something about your voice...I can't pinpoint it, but to me it sounds like you're genuinely interested and inquisitive i.e. you're displaying a very good attitude! Like I said, please continue your good work! In addition, have you thought of trying a distro that uses KDE with "Suspend desktop effects for fullscreen windows" checked? That's supposed to give a significant boost to one's frames per second when playing a game, so with Ubuntu being so darn close to Windows in performance, a distro like Manjaro running KDE should do even better!
Sabun Oct 3, 2013
Linux
Average FPS: 26.4
Min: 7.0
Max: 68.5

Windows:
Average FPS: 23.0
Min: 6.8
Max: 52.9
That's actually pretty good! I was honestly expecting the AMD driver to be unable to hold out that well (from prior experience with a HD6850).

Lastly: Sabun, have you tried the Valley benchmark too? Just curious how that turns out.
I haven't tried Valley just yet but since it's like a benchmark dedicated to foliage, which is pretty interesting, I'll give it a go today and see what I get.

EDIT: Just tried it.
Windows:
Average FPS: 35.4
Min: 21.0
Max: 62.9

Ubuntu:
Average FPS: 33.5
Min: 21.6
Max: 56.6

There is a big difference in the drivers though. I'm running the Beta 331.40 driver on Windows, where as Ubuntu is only running on the 319.49 driver. There's a difference, but not drastic enough to make me sad. Hopefully the 319.60 drivers will let me see that lost 2 fps made up for.

To force Intel integrated graphics, there should be an option in the BIOS.
There is an option in Asus for me to set it to either the dedicated or the integrated. It doesn't function so well though. If I go with the integrated, there will be times it just won't display to screen on boot until after a couple of restarts. I will try it today, as I'm interested to see what I'll get with these Unigine benchmarks and a HD4600 iGPU.

Thank you FutureSuture for the kind words :) The last KDE distro I tried was Kubuntu and OpenSuse, but my honest preference is so far the Unity DE and LXDE as well at times. I'll always be trying out different distros in the future, but for now I'll be sticking with just normal Ubuntu.
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