NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 On Linux

While Nexuiz is not the most demanding game on a modern graphics processor, it is used as one of the tests as it happens to be one of the most visually rich games that is available on Linux and is popular with many due to its free / open-source status. At the lowest resolution the GeForce GTX 460 performance is better than that of the ATI Radeon HD 4890, but by the time it was running at 2560 x 1600 it fell behind the Radeon HD 4890 and even slightly behind the Radeon HD 5770. Again though the GPU was not fully taxed by Nexuiz and with any of the tested graphics cards, except for the low-end GeForce GT 240, the game is definitely playable with both the ATI and NVIDIA hardware when using the proprietary drivers.

Lightsmark is another interesting test as an OpenGL lighting benchmark even though it is not representative of any game engine. The GeForce GTX 460 was the clear winner in this test at resolutions of 1280 x 1024, 1600 x 1200, and 1920 x 1080. At 2560 x 1600, however, its performance had fallen behind the Radeon HD 4890 and Radeon HD 5770. For those confused by the ATI Evergreen performance numbers at 1920 x 1080, AMD continues to have an odd Catalyst regression with this test at the given resolution.

While there are not any Unigine-powered games available for Linux right now, there is their real time strategy game that is just days away from being formally introduced and plenty of other games (such as Primal Carnage) that are on the way. Unigine's tech demos also happen to be the most demanding OpenGL benchmarks by far on Linux. The GeForce GTX 460 was able to maintain a narrow lead over the ATI Radeon HD 4890 at all resolutions except for 2560 x 1600 where the performance of the two graphics cards were the same at 42 FPS and the Radeon HD 5770 came in at 40 FPS.