In recent days on Phoronix I have published benchmarks showing Windows 8 beating Ubuntu Linux for Intel Haswell performance and the Radeon Gallium3D driver losing to AMD Catalyst Legacy on Windows. As some good news for NVIDIA Linux users, the performance on Ubuntu Linux can beat out Microsoft Windows 8 on modern GPUs. However, the strong Linux performance can only be found if using the closed-source NVIDIA driver and not the open-source Nouveau alternative.

In years past on Phoronix when delivering Windows vs. Linux benchmarks with NVIDIA graphics, the performance has generally been comparable with the performance being more or less the same. With Windows 8 and the latest Linux stack, it's still largely this way but there are some nice performance wins too. However, if using the Nouveau driver, it remains a rather dire situation.