Poor graphics performance in other distros besides Gentoo

[dillweed]

Ok, first of all, I'm not sure if this is the proper place to put this post, and if not please move it to where it should be.

At any rate, I've been doodling with other distros as of late on a spare HD and most recently tried Ubuntu, mainly because of the number it is close to the top on Distrowatch and I guess liked by many people. My main desktop is Gentoo and totally love it. So after installing Ubuntu and getting everything working, including the drivers for my Geforce 6600GT video card. I decided to do some informal tests to see what kind of performance Ubuntu has compaired to my Gentoo system. Really the only thing that I did was test glxgears and to see the results, I haven't played any games yet or tried any other benchmarking tools and I realize that glxgears is not a benchmarking tool. Anyways, I was very disappointed in the numbers I was getting it Ubuntu. For example, glxgears in Ubuntu topped out at 4550FPS and in Gentoo it was 6550FPS. Now, I wouldn't be posting this if it was only a 100 to maybe 500FPS difference, but 2000FPS is huge and something else is going on. I looked into my setting for X and the xorg.conf was identical, except for a couple of font directories, all the hardware is exactly the same (both HD's are 80 gig WD special editions), the Nvidia drivers were the same version (6629) and both kernels are 2.6.10 (and I was using the i686 kernel in Ubuntu). So why the huge 2000FPS difference???

I've posted this same question on the Ubuntu forums, asked in the ubuntu channel on Freenode and even asked the developers why the huge difference and no one can answer my question. Not to knock the Ubuntu forums, but I would say that most people there don't have the depth and knowledge that can be found on the Gentoo forums so I wasn't too suprised when no one really could answer my question.

Lot's of people say that optimizing your system does nothing for you, but to tell you the truth I think that it does. I have no hard numbers to prove this, but my Gentoo system, which isn't totally riced out, just seems to be quicker than Ubuntu, which is only optimized upto a 386 (at least that is what I understand it to be). Anyhow, maybe someone here knows the answer or can point me in the right direction. I look forward to further comment on this.

Dillweed

[Darkael]

glxgears is really not a proper benchmark tool. It's main purpose is just to quickly test if your direct rendering work or not. You shouldn't use it for performances comparisons.

[dillweed]

[cybermonkey]

Whats xorg are your using in ubuntu and gentoo?

xorg 6.8.2 is a major speed enhancement over 6.8.0 or whatever the last one was:lol:

[dillweed]

Cybermonkey, now that you mention it my gentoo box is running xorg 6.8.1 and ubuntu is running 6.8.2. I wasn't aware of the differences in speed, but it would seem that the 6.8.1 would be slower. Could the difference be the fact that glxgears is optimized on gentoo and not on ubuntu? If this is the case, maybe it hints of what optimization can do for the operating system overall (well at least for glxgears in this case.)

[cybermonkey]