High-End NVIDIA GeForce vs. AMD Radeon Linux Gaming Comparison

When running the open-source Xonotic first person shooter, the Radeon R9 290 performance was only running good enough with Catalyst on Linux to match the GeForce GTX 760... a graphics card that costs ~$250 compared to the $400+ price of the R9 290.

The GPU temperature data overall wasn't too incredibly interesting: the Radeon R9 290 is well known to be very hot and averaged out to a core temperature of 80 Celsius with a peak of 93C, the GeForce Kepler GPUs were hovering in the mid-to-upper 70s, and by far the coolest GPU was the Sapphire Radeon R9 270X with its tri-fan cooler.

The system power consumption results weren't also too surprising. The GTX TITAN and GTX 780 Ti were consuming the most power, but when looking at the performance results, they were still delivering the best performance-per-Watt overall.

While our comparison was limited on the AMD side due to the lack of AMD's cooperation, overall, it seems the high-end NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards continue to smash the AMD Radeon graphics cards under Linux when it comes to performance with the proprietary drivers. The AMD Catalyst Linux driver has been improving since Valve's been pushing Linux gaming, but still the NVIDIA proprietary Linux graphics driver is delivering top-notch OpenGL performance and continues to be the leading recommendation by game developers and gamers alike.

Next up will be some OpenCL and 2D tests from this same range of graphics cards. If you appreciate all of this Linux hardware testing and wish to support these efforts (and to allow new AMD hardware to be purchased...), tips are welcome or subscribe to Phoronix Premium to view multi-page articles on a single page, get ad-free viewing, etc.