Half-Life 2 Benchmarks On Linux Are Imminent

Pushed publicly yesterday was the test profile to run benchmarks of the popular Half-Life 2 game under Linux. As a result, coming out soon will be benchmarks of Half-Life 2 on Linux with an assortment of graphics cards and drivers.

However, if you're hoping this is the native version of Half-Life 2 / Source Engine for Linux, it unfortunately is not at the moment. As shared last year, Stefan Dösinger of CodeWeavers had been working on a variety of Wine-based test profiles to use for performance monitoring of Wine on a near-commit basis. Dösinger has been using these Wine-based tests to run many Wine-based Linux benchmarks of popular Windows applications to look for performance regressions and find other areas for optimization.

Now that Wine 1.4 and CodeWeavers' CrossOver XI are out the door, plus he's caught up on other matters, he's just made these test profiles public using OpenBenchmarking.org. All of Stefan's test profiles can be found via this listing or his user account page.

Thanks to OpenBenchmarking.org and the Phoronix Test Suite, it's now as easy as running phoronix-test-suite benchmark stefandoesinger/halflife2 to run Wine-based Half-Life 2 benchmarks under Linux with Wine or even natively under Windows. I haven't looked at these Wine test profiles from Stefan in many months, so at the moment I'm not sure what caveats or limitations there are at the moment in terms of needing the Valve's Steam or other binaries.

This should work with any Phoronix Test Suite 3.0+ client connected to OpenBenchmarking.org, but it's always recommended to be running the latest release for the most feature-rich experience. Besides the Half-Life 2 test profile, he's also uploaded tests for TrackMania Nations, Stream Source Direct3D, DrawPrimitive Direct3D, Clear Direct3D, 3DMark 2000, and 3DMark 2001. He's also uploaded a test suite containing these tests he's running frequently. Anyone is welcome to upload their own test profiles/suites to OpenBenchmarking.org for a seamless and automated benchmarking experience in conjunction with the Phoronix Test Suite.

As a result of these public tests on the Phoronix Test Suite, coming up soon I'll be running some Wine 1.2/1.4 benchmarks, etc. For now though you can already look at the Wine 1.4 benchmarks that were uploaded to OpenBenchmarking.org by him and others.

Stay tuned for more. In terms of the Phoronix Test Suite, also be sure to read yesterday's Making Compiler, Disk Testing More Reproducible.