Some Early NVIDIA Performance Figures For The Newest Linux Game: F1 2015

Feral Interactive released F1 2015 for Linux earlier today and it sure is a demanding game. Here are some preliminary benchmark figures.

Earlier today I shared what happens if trying this game on the AMDGPU-PRO or RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers while NVIDIA graphics -- specifically the proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver -- is what Feral lists for the graphics requirements. The game is rather demanding even though it premiered on Windows last year: the Linux port with OpenGL recommends at least a GeForce GTX 970.

I've been benchmarking a variety of different NVIDIA graphics cards on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. I'm not done yet, but need some sleep so I figured I would share the initial results I have completed so far today... Tomorrow will be my complete performance round-up for F1 2015 on Linux with several more NVIDIA GeForce Kepler/Maxwell graphics cards from the same configuration.
Those are the cards I got through testing today before calling it a night. Thankfully, Feral's Linux port of F1 2015 not only has the in-game benchmark menu option, but the -benchmark CLI option even works in their Linux build! I'm super happy that Feral ported that functionality too (since they hadn't in some of their other recent game ports with titles having such CLI benchmarking ability under Windows) and will allow this racing game to be used in more of our GPU/driver Linux articles at Phoronix. I've already added the F12015 test profile on OpenBenchmarking.org for Phoronix Test Suite users. While there is this -benchmark switch, unfortunately I haven't found any way yet to be able to cleanly specify all of the resolution/graphics settings; thus for now the test profile is shipping with a few static preferences files of the resolutions / in-game settings options and overwrites the game's default preferences list at load-time. Those wanting more details can dig through the raw test profile.

At 1080p with low image quality settings, most recent NVIDIA cards should be able to handle this Formula One racing game. Feral lists the GT 640 as the minimum requirement. In tomorrow's results I will have more low-end cards as part of this comparison.

With high image quality settings at 1080p, the GTX 680 and GTX 960 couldn't deliver a 60 FPS average. Note that with the F1 2015 benchmark mode, there are some differences in the AI between runs and it did affect the FPS a bit. Fortunately, the Phoronix Test Suite is running the game at each setting a minimum of three times and increases that dynamically when there is high deviation in the results. The graphs also indicate where such high deviation occurred, etc.

The high-end Kepler (sans the GTX 680) and Maxwell cards could handle F1 2015 on Ubuntu Linux at 1080p with ultra image quality settings.

2560 x 1440p with ultra image quality settings is quite the kicker, so for this Linux game port in its current stage I didn't even bother running at 4K.

Stay tuned for the rest of the results tomorrow. You can dig through all of the data and/or run your own comparisons via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file. As usual, if you like what you see here on Phoronix with all of my Linux tests, please consider joining our club to allow more Linux hardware tests to happen and my continued development of open-source benchmarking software. Thanks!