NVIDIA 3D Under Linux

Quake 3 Arena Benchmark 640x480 Normal

Quake 3 Arena is also available as a Linux version, which makes it a perfect cross-OS benchmark, besides the fact that it's a very successful game, which can be fully enjoyed by Linux users as well.

At the low 640x480 resolution the fast cards perform close to identical. The current handicap of NVIDIA's latest Linux drivers, is the fact that they don't do page flipping, but 'Blt'ting. Page flipping is a lot faster at high resolutions, but at lower resolutions the 'blt'ting has hardly got any impact.

If you look across the different chipsets and CPUs you can see the old story, which of course is just as valid for Linux as well as for Windows. Good old BX133 is faster than the rest, Thunderbird can score almost as well as Coppermine. Only the Apollo Pro133A seems to have a problem that merely appears under Linux.