NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 On Linux

With the more demanding but not most demanding Unigine demo, Unigine Tropics, the performance of the ATI Radeon HD 4890 and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 were neck-and-neck but at 1920 x 1080 and 2560 x 1600 it was able to maintain a small but statistically significant lead over the GF104 graphics card.

Unigine Heaven is the most demanding Unigine-based OpenGL test for the time being. With the Catalyst 10.7 Linux driver release though there are show-stopping regressions in Heaven with Evergreen ASICs, which caused us to only be able to run this game on the ATI side when using the R700-generation Radeon HD 4890. The ATI Radeon HD 4890 was much faster than the GeForce GTX 460. At even 1280 x 1024, the ATI graphics processor was 33% faster than the GeForce GTX 460 768MB and at 2560 x 1600 it was 26% faster. On average, based upon the tested resolutions, the Radeon HD 4890 was 31% faster than the GeForce GTX 460 768MB graphics card. It would have been interesting to see how the ATI Radeon HD 5770 plays into the mix, but alas, Catalyst Linux issues barred this from happening.

While not the most popular open-source game, VDrift is interesting for its more demanding graphical needs than most of the other ioquake3-type projects. The GeForce GTX 460 was able to maintain a lead over the Radeon HD 4890 at all resolutions except for 2560 x 1600 where it lost by two frames per second.