AMD vs. NVIDIA Linux Gaming Performance

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The alternative OS gurus at Phoronix have published an AMD vs. NVIDIA Linux gaming performance article featuring DiRT Showdown running on fourteen different graphics cards.

Yesterday marked the release of DiRT Showdown for Linux as ported over by Virtual Programming using their eON technology. With being able to use it as an automated, reproducible benchmark, I spent most of the day and into the night working on some initial AMD Radeon vs. NVIDIA GeForce graphics card benchmarks using this DiRT game that's finally available to Linux/SteamOS gamers, three years after it was released for Windows. This initial comparison is a 14-way Linux gaming graphics card comparison.
 
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I think the [H] has taken out another web page (inadvertently) due to everyone and their brother now checking it out.

Ah 3rd time was the charm.
 
Elf_Boy said:
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I think the [H] has taken out another web page (inadvertently) due to everyone and their brother now checking it out.

Ah 3rd time was the charm.
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I don't think that's the case. There aren't that many people that care about Linux in a desktop environmentx, and even fewer who use it for gaming.
 
I use Linux for Desktop, on my laptop, HTPC and BSD as my router. I have a windows machine in the corner of my computer room that streams using steam the windows only games I want to play to the Linux machines.

Linux benchmarks are always nice as I can compare the results of the nvidia cards to the windows side of things to see how it compares. If it's worth streaming the game over my network or playing it natively.

I just try to not use windows as much as possible because I actually find it harder to use, navigate and I never know exactly what is happening behind the scenes.
 
The link is dead but I'll go ahead and assume that a company that can't be bothered to roll out Windows drivers in a timely fashion certainly won't have decent Linux support.

Give them three or four years and when they "refresh" their line up with a few re-releases you finally get a decent driver.

You can imagine how bitter I'd be if I didn't run AMD.
 
Stoly said:
why? they are just as bad if not worse.
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Catalyst drivers are better somewhat most of the time. A lot of people will tell you that their frame rates are smoother with open source compared to Catalyst. Sometimes open source is faster.
 
At this point, a Linux game that even runs on AMD is a win these days. Nevermind benchmarks.
 
Ashbringer said:
Would be more interesting to see AMD on open source drivers.
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It's only a DiRT Showdown benchmark and the OSS drivers almost certainly don't support the game since both AMD and Nvidia OSS drivers at least support the minimum OGL version required for the game. Larabel doesn't shy away from OSS "game" benchmarks.
 
Heyyo,

Sadly there isn't any competition... AMD's Linux driver team is just too small to keep up with NVIDIA's which is a damn shame too since Steam Machines are supposed to be rolling out in November...

Then again, there's Steam Machines that offer Multi-GPUs... when Multi-GPU with current versions of OpenGL don't even work on Windows... so... I'm curious if those will be setup in dual-boot configurations or just Windows so at least those Multi-GPU systems will work correctly with their Steam Machine and DirectX.

jwcalla said:
At this point, a Linux game that even runs on AMD is a win these days. Nevermind benchmarks.
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They do work, it just usually requires waiting on a driver to at least get playable framerates.

Maybe once Khronos Group puts out Vulkan API on Linux and games support it? Maybe then the playing field will be a lot more even... heck, maybe it'll even play just as good as Windows and DirectX 12 or Vulkan on there? You never know I guess... I'm very hopeful for Vulkan as my Two-way GTX 680 is useless in Linux. Second GPU just sits there spinning a fan unless I wanted 200+ fps in Doom 3 since ID Tech Engine 4 was as far as I remember the last game engine with a version of OpenGL that worked with Multi-GPU.

Ashbringer said:
Catalyst drivers are better somewhat most of the time. A lot of people will tell you that their frame rates are smoother with open source compared to Catalyst. Sometimes open source is faster.
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AMD have been really good about assisting Open Source driver development which is good... but dayum though, they really gotta fix their driver bottleneck on their cards....
 
I used to read all this ranting about how AMD sucked and Nvidia ruled in performance. Enough so that I bought my first Nvidia graphics card after a decade of AMD hardware.

Well boo fucken hoo. Also Nvidia performance sucked. In fact I hardly saw any difference when using the binary drivers vs AMD. I learned to take all this talk about performance with a grain of salt.
 
ThE_MarD said:
Maybe once Khronos Group puts out Vulkan API on Linux and games support it? Maybe then the playing field will be a lot more even... heck, maybe it'll even play just as good as Windows and DirectX 12 or Vulkan on there? You never know I guess... I'm very hopeful for Vulkan as my Two-way GTX 680 is useless in Linux. Second GPU just sits there spinning a fan unless I wanted 200+ fps in Doom 3 since ID Tech Engine 4 was as far as I remember the last game engine with a version of OpenGL that worked with Multi-GPU.
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One of the things I noticed with SIGGRAPH is that AMD was I think the only GPU vendor who didn't show off a working demo. Even Qualcomm and IT had stuff to show. Hopefully AMD isn't way behind in their driver implementation.
 
Ashbringer said:
Would be more interesting to see AMD on open source drivers.
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Phoronix posted another R9 article using OSS drivers (no game benchmarks). The OSS drivers don't support OpenGL 4.x on that card, so the interesting, but not unsurprising, thing is that OSS drivers wouldn't even run DiRT Showdown on an R9. :p
 
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I tried an R9 280oc card and I can confirm the drivers are mostly only good if you want to do web browsing/etc. Even the linux version of the games don't work properly. It's sad too because I am just about ready to go back to being on linux full time again.
 
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