AMD vs. NVIDIA Linux Gaming Performance For DiRT Showdown

The NVIDIA GTX 760 was delivering around 60 FPS at 1080p with ultra image quality settings while the higher-end NVIDIA GPUs were running much higher, but still not too much of a difference between say the GTX 780 Ti and GTX 980 Ti. The AMD GPUs with ultra 1080p settings were running just over 60 FPS.

It will be interesting to see how the open-source drivers perform for DiRT Showdown once they fully support this game. It will also be interesting to see if Virtual Programming is able to squeeze any greater performance out of this game due to its eON wrapper usage. Hopefully they'll also be able to fix up the 4K resolution support to be able to push these graphics cards harder for testing. Last but not least, hopefully sooner rather than later AMD will be able to deliver some Catalyst Linux optimizations for this game and make other improvements so their Radeon hardware can become more competitive for Linux gaming.

When it came to the visual quality, both the Catalyst 15.7 and NVIDIA 355.06 drivers appeared to render the game fine, at least as far as the benchmark mode goes. However, from both driver vendors there was the occasional startup hang as talked about at the beginning of this article. The Radeon HD 7950 also was unstable when trying to run at 1080p with ultra settings.

As always, if you appreciate all of the extensive Linux hardware testing done daily at Phoronix, the addition of the DiRT Showdown test profile to the Phoronix Test Suite, and the other open-source Linux benchmarking work, please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium to help support the site and/or to consider a PayPal tip to allow for more of these articles in the future; these reminders have become a necessity out of the percentage of people utilizing ad-blockers. If you have any special test requests or additions you'd like to see to this Linux DiRT benchmarking in the future, be sure to voice your feedback when tipping or subscribing to our ad-free, single-page premium site service. Thanks for your support that motivates me in continuing the frequent 100+ hour weeks to near single-handedly make all of this Linux benchmarking / hardware reviews, open-source benchmark development, and open-source news on Phoronix possible.