The Open-Source Linux Graphics Card Showdown

When running Xonotic with the higher quality visuals, this is one of the most demanding open-source Linux native games available. Running Xonotic at 1920 x 1080 with high quality settings did lead to the Radeon HD 5750, Radeon HD 6570, Radeon HD 6770, and GeForce 9800GT graphics cards being faster than the Intel HD 4000 graphics. However, the Intel Core i7 3770K in this open-source comparison was still faster than the Radeon HD 4670, Radeon HD 6450, GeForce 9500GT, and GeForce GT 220. The Intel Core i7 3770K at 1920 x 1080 with high quality visuals would still be considered largely playable with an average frame-rate in the intense demo of 48 FPS.

While the i7-3770K did not beat out several of the discrete AMD/NVIDIA graphics cards on their open-source driver, when it came to the performance-per-Watt, Intel was leading. For the power efficiency over performance, the only graphics card able to match the i7-3770K on open-source was the Radeon HD 6570. The Radeon HD 5750 and Radeon HD 6770 and GeForce GT 220 were a bit further back while the rest of the cards were a ways behind in this FPS-per-Watt measurement.

The overall system power consumption for the i7-3770K when running Xonotic was 77 Watts.