this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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People say this, but what exactly do you mean? I mostly model on windows because it's my primary system (I use applications that simply don't work well enough with wine), but mostly finish and render stuff on linux because of windows' retarded automatic updates etc. that can just cancel rendering without asking. And the only difference I've seen is how fast Blender starts - I'd say that's more than 2x as fast on linux, it's a huge difference. But rendering is the same (NVidia GTX GPU) and other work inside blender also seems to be about the same.
We're referencing a somewhat old video of a benchmark ran in both systems https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpE2B2QSsa0 that's likely not still true, possibly devs figured out what was the issue on windows and circumvented it somehow.
Yeah, don't do that anymore then. Firstly the video doesn't really find overall 2x speedup, but mainly Cycles X came out since then, where most of the codebase has been rewritten from scratch, and after that numerous significant optimizations happened as well. That video is pretty much irrelevant now.
Nvidia drivers don't tend to be as performant under linux.
With AMD instead of using the AMD VLK driver, you would use the RADV (developed largely by valve). Which petforms better.
Every AMD card under linux supports OpenCL (the driver is more based on graphics card architecture) and you install it very easily. Googling it with windows found pages of errors and missing support.
Blender supports OpenCL. I bet the 2x improvement is Blender being able to ofload rendering to the AMD graphics card.
Also this represents the biggest headache in Linux, lots of gamers insist they can only use Nvidia cards. Nvidia treats linux as an afterthought as best or deliberately sabotages things at worse.
AMD embraced open source and so Linux land is much nicer on AMD (and to a less extent Intel).
The results here will probably be a DxVK quirk, lots of "Nvidia optimised" games have game engines doing weird things and the Nvidia driver compensates. DxVK has been identifying that to produce "good" vulkan calls.
Afaik Blender since 3.0 does not support OpenCL anymore and AMD rendering uses HIP instead. I have not found any information about dramatic performance differences, though CPU rendering does seem to be somewhat faster on Linux - but more like 10% faster and the amount of computation practically done on the CPU is not that big.
Personally I use NVidia because of CUDA, gaming is an afterthought. I wish CUDA just fucked off and we got some universal compute API instead, because that's what would reduce the NVidia stranglehold on the market, perhaps OneAPI is going to catch on at some point, but at this moment those options are not practical.