Blender: faster on Linux or Windows?

Using the Network render option on Blender version 2.71 I was able to test the same machine on both Linux and Windows, so what was the fastest?

History

I was following this tutorial on making an island environment in Blender and I went down a bit of a rabbit warren when I thought “Hey Blender can work in meters rather than some nameless Blender unit I wonder if I made the island realistically big what would happen”. Well it just took longer to render because now I had to have four ocean squares. As I was in Blender render rather than cycles it was time to break out the network.

Network

My main machine is a Llano A6 3500 (passmark rating 2009) with 16 G RAM, 256G SSD, 1Tb HDD and a 24” widescreen display all running on Windows 7 x64. But over the years I have accumulated other machines:-

• an old XP running desktop with an AMD Athlon 64 x2 4000+ 4Gb RAM  (passmark rating 1285)
• another AMD desktop this time a 5000 Dual core (passmark rating 1228) running 32bit Debian (2GB RAM)
• a Dell Inspiron 1520 with an Intel Celeron M 540 @ 1.86GHz 4GB RAM (passmark rating 542) runs either Windows Vista or Knoppix, in this case Knoppix as Blender refuses to install on it under Vista
• a Samsung laptop with an Intel Core i3-3110M @ 2.40 6GB RAM (passmark 3067) running Windows 8.1 x64
• and finally another Samsung laptop with a Pentium Dual core (Intel Pentium T4200@2GHz passmark 1153, 4GB RAM) running Ubuntu Studio (32bit)

Set up and configuration

Blender’s network render consist of 3 different types of machine:

1. A Master which sends jobs it receives from
2. Clients to
3.  Slaves

Well the useless Celeron was made the Master with all the rest being slaves and the main windows 7 box (with the Llano) also being a client (a box can be more than one type of node on the network)

Results

The passmark ranking order (biggest number = fastest machine) would be

1. Samsung i3
2. Llano
3. Athlon 64 x2
4. Athlon 5000
5. Samsung T4200

Which I know from experience is very wrong!

Ubuntu Studio

The Athlon X2 was so slow as to not make any odds to the results and it kept banging up errors so I removed it, so here are the average run times from 3 initial runs on the Pentium Dual Samsung laptop running Ubuntu Studio (14) 32 bit times in seconds per a frame

Run 1	46.675
Run 2	45.9125
Run 3	45.7625

For an overall average of 46.12

Windows 7 x64

Same machine but this time running windows 7 x64 (I have two different drives which I swap out, so its not dual boot) Same job with 4 other computers on the network

Run 1	37.23333
Run 2	36.34167
Run 3	36.025

Overall average of 36.5333 seconds per a frame, nearly 10 seconds a frame faster than Ubuntu!
A 20% performance gain by changing the OS

Fedora 20 x64

Now lets install a different linux this time a 64bit version, I choose this because there was a promise of a tuned Blender, which did not happen but stock 2.71 running on Fedora 20 on the same laptop (same CPU, same RAM etc)

Run 1	23.43846
Run 2	20.93571
Run 3	21.00769

Overall average of 21.7939
A staggering 14 seconds a frame faster! I make that almost 70% improvement over Ubuntu and about 40% from Windows

Summary

Update from 32 bit to 64 bit as soon as you can