Counter-Strike: Global Offensive NVIDIA/AMD Benchmarks On Linux

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Gaming on 23 September 2014 at 12:30 AM EDT. Page 1 of 6. 60 Comments.

Several hours ago Valve finally released to the public the Linux port of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive! This has been one of the most sought after titles to come to Steam on Linux by gamers and now it's finally out there. Of course, soon as it was made public, we added support for the game to our benchmarking software. After a very busy night, here's the first widely available benchmarks of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive running natively on Linux. Up for this first round of testing are an assortment of AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards with the proprietary graphics drivers.

Upon the release of CS: GO for Linux I added a new test profile to OpenBenchmarking.org for being able to benchmark the game via the Phoronix Test Suite. While I still dislike having to benchmark games distributed via Steam, Counter-Strike: GO with the Source Engine can be automated well enough to cover all the basics. Thus after committing that test, the next several hours were just a matter of swapping out graphics cards while the Phoronix Test Suite proceeded to benchmark CS:GO on Linux in a fully-automated and standardized manner.


An assortment of the NVIDIA GeForce GPUs tested for this Linux launch article.

Besides sharing the raw results, to make this data more interesting, the Phoronix Test Suite also included in system power consumption data, power efficiency, and GPU thermal metrics. This was done via setting the MONITOR=sys.power,gpu.temp and PERFORMANCE_PER_WATT=1 environment variables while the Phoronix Test Suite takes care of the rest. A USB-based WattsUp Pro AC power meter was supplying the power information to the Phoronix Test Suite.


Counter-Strike: Global Offensive tests in the new Linux office.

Due to the limited time since the public release of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive for Linux, this article is only looking at the performance of the latest NVIDIA and AMD proprietary Linux graphics drivers on an assortment of modern hardware. The selection of hardware was limited to the GPUs supported by the latest binary blobs and the GPUs within my possession that weren't tasked to other systems at the time. In follow-up CS:GO Linux articles will be benchmarks using the open-source Mesa/Gallium3D drivers for Intel/AMD/NVIDIA.


Some of the AMD Radeon GPUs tested for this initial CS: GO Linux benchmarking.

If you have other test requests using Counter-Strike: Global Offensive on Linux, let us know via Facebook, Twitter, or Google+. Of course, we try especially hard to honor your requests in a timely manner if you happen to be a Phoronix Premium subscriber. This testing is very time intensive and consuming so your support is appreciated in continuing to run the only Linux enthusiast-oriented hardware review site.


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