Valve Source Engine Linux Benchmarks Are Imminent

I am now cleared to begin publishing Linux graphics benchmarks of Valve's Source Engine games on Linux plus other performance-related information from the Steam Linux client.

While I've been part of the Valve Linux beta program from the beginning, I had to refrain from sharing any benchmarks and other performance-related figures while the Valve Linux developers worked out any early bugs. With the huge expansion of their Linux beta program this week, Valve is now getting fairly comfortable with the state of their Linux binaries. As such, I was informed last night by Valve that I'm now allowed to go ahead and begin publishing the performance data on Phoronix.

Of course, if you follow me on Twitter you would have already known that these Valve Linux benchmarks are imminent. There will be a comparison of many different AMD/NVIDIA/Intel graphics processors, different Linux graphics drivers, and other hardware configurations for the couple of new titles available right now to Linux.

If anyone has any test requests or suggestions, direct them to the Phoronix Forums or @MichaelLarabel. Team Fortress 2 will be first up as there's nice command line options while some of the Serious Sam 3 commands are a bit flaky. To be uploaded to OpenBenchmarking.org this weekend will be the first of the Phoronix Test Suite test profiles for these new games via the Steam client. Unfortunately though due to them being retail games and needing to be handled through Steam, it won't be a completely fluid and streamlined process for automated benchmarking of these titles, but regardless they will be reproducible and straightforward just as with the 150+ other test profiles currently available from our open-source automated benchmarking platform.

Expect lots of data and articles to be out in the next week or two. While the beta is now much larger, it's still closed access, so for anyone going to the Phoronix New York City meet-up this month I'll also bring along a Linux gaming laptop with Steam loaded up for those that want to try it out.