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walsufnir on 24 June 2013
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allenmaher said:

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The overhead between Windows and a Unix running with Xorg and Gnome is mostly the same, also ram-usage. It's only better when acting as a server. Also there are no amd-drivers - Sony has a special team for drivers. Take a look at this guy: https://twitter.com/postgoodism

Also keep in mind that also MS knows of overhead - that is why the dashboard only uses 32 mb on 360 :)

Both have optimized drivers, API and in general kernels for gaming.

On my hardware the ram usage is 1.5 times as much on Windows 7 and io read write benchmarks are only 50% as fast. (I use Unity because I don't like where Gnome Shell went... plus X is slowly but surely going to be supplanted by MIR and/or Wayland... and it was too long in coming)

There is an interesting set of benchmarks comparing a few BSD and linux varients on the same hardware here, sadly windows is not in the mix in this one:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=16_way_linux&num=1

(note: proprietary AMD drivers are only installed by default in one test case so a few of the benchmarks are skewed but they make a note of that in the comparison)

But you are right, If MS strips away a lot of the OS for XBOne they can clear up a lot of the overhead gap.  Windows display drivers get extra love and tend to be quite good (Intel and AMD particularily), but DirectX is slower than OpenGL, even on windows acording to Valve benchmarks due to the extra level of abstraction.

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/133824-valve-opengl-is-faster-than-directx-even-on-windows

FreeBSD + a good sony in house display driver should work very well for the PS4.


and io read write benchmarks are only 50% as fast.

What? Than there is definitely something wrong with your Windows-setup :) There is no io-advantage in Linux compared to Windows.

And yes, freebsd is actually a good choice.