For the release of Cedega 6.0 "Swordfish" later this week, Phoronix will be offering a performance comparison of Enemy Territory and Doom 3 running natively in Microsoft Windows XP, Microsoft Windows Vista, and Linux. Along with those numbers we will be sharing the results when each game was benchmarked in WINE 0.9.32 and Cedega 6.0. Originally Quake 4 was on the table for use in this comparison, but Swordfish had a few problems with Quake 4 installer. However, I spent the extra time and while I was at it had run three Quake 4 v1.3 benchmarks in XP, Vista, and Fedora Core 6 (2.6.20 kernel). The hardware used was a modest AMD Sempron setup with a NVIDIA GeForce 6150 and the NVIDIA 1.0-9755 drivers (the hardware chosen was to represent the more common Linux user rather than using an octal-core setup). The NVIDIA driver on Vista was 100.65 while the XP version was 93.71. Below is the average frame-rate from each test on each operating system.

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Quake 4
640 x 480 - Low Quality
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Windows XP SP2: 25.9
Windows Vista (Build 5600): 22.2
Fedora Core 6 (Linux 2.6.20): 26.1

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Quake 4
800 x 600 - Low Quality
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Windows XP SP2: 19.0
Windows Vista (Build 5600): 14.3
Fedora Core 6 (Linux 2.6.20): 18.2

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Quake 4
1280 x 1024 - Low Quality
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Windows XP SP2: 7.9
Windows Vista (Build 5600): 6.4
Fedora Core 6 (Linux 2.6.20): 7.3

While nothing decisive can be drawn from testing a single game on these different operating systems with just three benchmarks, these results are quite interesting. In all three benchmarks Quake 4 on Fedora had outperformed the Vista RC1 Build 5600 tests. In all of the benchmarks, Windows XP was within a frame of Linux. Yes, Linux at most was 3.9 FPS faster than Vista, but with the GeForce 6150 setup that equated to being about 27% faster. In the benchmarks that will be published this Wednesday, the performance delta between Linux and Vista and XP is quite similar -- Cedega and WINE had both outperformed Vista in Enemy Territory and Doom 3. Granted, due to the current state of the ATI fglrx drivers, this would only be possible when using NVIDIA graphics (though AMD could fix this in the new OpenGL driver). Stay tuned to Phoronix this week for the XP/Vista/Linux and Cedega/WINE results. If there's any other benchmarks or information you would like to see, just ask.

Games are known to be slower than normal on Vista atm: the drivers have not yet been optimized.

ATI sux...

Vista should be declare a pollution of the world as well as the nuclear wastes.

Why play Quake 4 on Wine when you can play the game natively on Linux? The native linux version of Quake 4 should have better FPS numbers.

Also on the comment about ATI: I Concur, On Linux and on Windows

"Cedega and WINE had both outperformed Vista in Enemy Territory and Doom 3"

Do you use Cedega and WINE to play ET and Doom 3? There are native versions for linux...