After reviewing my previous post regarding benchmarks between Wine and Windows, I decided the conclusions needed updating for multiple reasons:
- Wine has evolved quite a bit — we now have a “stable” 1.0 release as well as other new releases.
- Windows has been updated since Windows XP — namely, Windows Vista.
- Hardware has changed drastically
The machine I am running these benchmarks on (my machine):
Benchmarks were ran on Ubuntu Intrepid and Windows Vista, all with every available (default) updates (including service packs) and no other applications running. I disabled desktop effects in Ubuntu, and I disabled Aero (I set the theme “Windows Classic”) in Vista. I used Cinebench R10 in WINE version 1.1.17.
Results were as follows:
| Test | Vista | Ubuntu | Percent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Single CPU Rendering | 3190 | 3197 | 0.2% for Linux |
| Multiple CPU Rendering | 13039 | 11060 | 15.2% for Windows |
| OpenGL | 4873 | 7634 | 36.2% for Linux |
A few interesting things to note:
- WINE and Windows have almost exactly the same performance for running processes that only use one CPU (single thread.)
- Windows scales better then WINE scales. WINE will fall behind when running processor-intensive multi-threaded applications, but the application would be far from unusable.
- WINE is substantially better then Windows (36.2%) at running OpenGL applications, which means games and other software that use OpenGL may actually run better in WINE then in Windows.
