Does Cycles render significantly faster on Linux than Windows?

I’ve stumbled upon some threads about how Cycles renders 30% faster on Linux over Windows. Is that still the case?

For gpu renders this indeed still the case, more info here

I’m not sure if as much as you say, but it’s true that Linux is faster on CPU (you compare identical CPUs):

With GPU times are very similar (at least CUDA)

And speed may depend on nvidia driver version too. For example, the result that I shared there in GPU benchmark had been done with very old driver, new driver works much faster.

Edit:
It seemed that I contradict LazyDodo :). Sorry, I did not know there were still problems in Windows 10. But at least with Windows 7 results were very similar.

I had a dual boot Windows 10, and Manjaro system. Blender on Manjaro rendered about 10-15% faster on my GPU. I never really tested the CPU for rendering times.

Cool! Thanks for the inputs guys. I’ve been running Sheep It render farm on my GTX 1070 & 660ti while I’m sleeping. It looks like I’ll be playing with Linux this weekend.

That´s what LazyDodos articles says, doesn´t it? Windows 8 and 10 use something called WDDM to handle Display relevant things. WDDM uses a lot of resources and leads to significantly longer render times. About 30% longer.

If the problem is the part where displays are handled, the question is command line rendering as fast as on Linux because it doesn´t need to show the rendering process on a display?

I think it is something else. I have both Linux Ubuntu and Window 10 machines on a small render farm, and Linux just render faster. I don’t know why or how it can be fixed, but it just simply does right now. I rather go all windows 10, but that doesn’t seem to be possible right now.

You think it is something different than WDDM like described in that article posted above?

Blender running in Ubuntu on Windows is about 7.5% faster on CPU renders than the native Windows binary. Ubuntu on Windows doesn’t support GPU passthrough yet so it’s not directly related but this was kind of a surprise to me.

You think it is something different than WDDM like described in that article posted above?

i don’t know, but it is a bummer. Since my workstation is Windows 10 and I have to deal with Ubuntu maintenance too for the additional speedup.

It seems to be very hard to get consistent performance on Windows. I discovered this many years ago after optimizing some MATLAB code on Linux, and feeling quite pleased with myself, only to discover that all the versions worked at pretty much the same speed on Windows. :frowning:

Moral: if you want performance, go Linux.

I would love to go Linux, but too many software I need is just not supported on it.

I’ve been doing some benchmarking on my Mac and Linux boxes(same graphics card) and the GPU render on the mac is on par with the linux boxes using the web drivers from NVIDIA. Looks like the WDDM mode is the issue.