Apple Mac OS X OpenCL Performance vs. Linux

Yesterday we looked at the performance of Apple's "Snow Leopard Graphics Update" for Mac OS X 10.6.4 designed to enhance both the image quality and rendering performance for OpenGL games and applications. For testing their graphics update we benchmarked Mac OS X 10.6.2, 10.6.3, 10.6.4, and 10.6.4 with the Snow Leopard Graphics Update 1.0 installed and benchmarked the Apple OpenGL performance against Ubuntu Linux. The results were mixed showing Apple still has room to optimize their OpenGL stack compared to NVIDIA's Linux implementation and in not all areas did this package update result in performance enhancements. After we finished that OpenGL comparison, we decided to see how the OpenCL performance compares between Mac OS X 10.6.4 and Ubuntu Linux 10.04.1 LTS. We tested the Open Computing Language on both the Intel Core 2 Duo CPU and on the NVIDIA GPU.