Linux 3D Games Run Faster On PC-BSD

koinu writes "Phoronix has published benchmarks comparing 3D game performance on Ubuntu Linux 11.04 with the FreeBSD Linux ABI emulation on the 8.2 release of PC-BSD, which is a desktop variant of FreeBSD. Most results show that the emulated Linux layer on FreeBSD performs better than Linux natively. It's pretty interesting, because most people would expect that an additional abstraction layer would generally slow down the execution of binaries."

Re:Which illustrates what we already knew

[ByOhTek]

Actually reading TFA

Comparisons:
CPU: Same
Mobo: Linux: MSI, BSD: (ASUS?) - In my experience MSI is slightly faster and a bit less stable
Memory: Linux: 4GB, BSD: 3.2GB
HDD: Doesn't say the brand for BSD, but the size appears right for a 2^10th united 250GB drive. Seagates aren't known for their speed though.
GPU: Same
Audio/Network: Different, probably wouldn't provide more than a small variance
Desktop Manager: Linux: Unity, BSD: KDE4 - Neither is resource friend, so I can't make a call on this.
X: Linux's is newer, speed improvements or feature bloat?
Driver: Same.
GCC: Linux is newer so will probably optimise better, or be about the same. But these are probably the system defaults, so I have trouble saying this is inappropriate.
FileSystem: BSD has zfs, which I believe is faster than ext4, but I'm not sure on this. Is this the native for PCBSD? FreeBSD, to my knowledge still defaults to UFS2

"unfair" advantages for Linux: More memory, possibly a faster mobo.
"unfair" advantage to PCBSD: possibly the use of zfs, it depends on if it is the default for PCBSD. PCBSD might have something faster than a slowgate.
Wildcards: Unity vs. KDE4, X versions, audio, network.