Linux version holding Windows back, computer says...

I doubt that any laggy-ness of the windows-gui has anything to do with the graphics card.
In fact since I go an ssd I am pretty sure that mostly the hdd was at fault, since many lags just disappeared.

Well, it is primarily according to how the window manager is written. You can avoid a lot of those issues, regardless of IOWait, if you write a decent window manager, that can act, while windows underperform.

This is also one of OS X's window manager's strengths. But the graphics driver is not unimportant, I've noticed significant window manager performance differences on different drivers, albeit for the same card.

Sure thats possible and should be done, but has nothing to do with the graphics driver.

How do you even measure windows-manager performance? Its a so simple task, there is not much to benchmark. The worst thing that can happen is the gui loading something from a slowpoke-disk.

Scientifically? I have no idea, honestly. All I know is that Apple does something to make the graphics drivers work better with their hardware, but they do not focus on high performance.

Remember, it was rather impressive back in 1994, when Steve Jobs presented NeXT and its ability to move windows around while their content was still in them! Before that, it had usually been turning the window into a white box to indicate its position while it was moved around.

Today, the focus is trying to get the window management from the CPU to the GPU, since the GPU is faster than the CPU at handling such actions, and then the CPU can focus on content inside. And that's where drivers become important.

In 1994 I was 2 years old. I didnt care much about window managers back then
But I get what you mean.

That might be the case. However since the windows are not that complex, it should not be very hard to draw them fast. I just haven't seen bad performance on any kind of windows-manager ever that was caused by the graphics card. At least I never realized that the gfx was at fault.

Thing is the 2D side of things in Windows hasn't ever really been properly hardware accelerated.
Lowest common hardware denominator means they couldn't expect a decent GPU to be available so relied on the CPU in the main.

But with increasing capability of integrated graphics chipsets MS is changing that with Windows 8.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Window ... 16397.html