Unreal Engine 4 Linux Tests With AMD & NVIDIA Graphics Drivers

This week there was a 22-way graphics card test of Metro Redux on Linux using GeForce and Radeon hardware with the latest AMD and NVIDIA proprietary drivers. Today the newest Linux gaming test candidate to look at is the AMD/NVIDIA Linux performance with the latest Unreal Engine 4 demos. In this article is a look at the UE4 Linux performance on AMD and NVIDIA graphics hardware running with Ubuntu.

With having the Metro 2033 Redux and Metro Last Light Redux support squared away, the libframetime work benefited in being able to get it working with the UE4 tech demos for obtaining performance information (per-frame time data) for the various tech demos. With some other changes, as outlined yesterday, there's now nice automated Unreal Engine 4 benchmarks for Linux that integrate well with the Phoronix Test Suite. Read that aforelinked article for more details on the implementation for those curious and hopefully the UE4 benchmarking state will only get better.

For this initial testing, I attempted to use the same graphics cards as the Metro Redux article earlier this week. However, like the Metro Redux tests with the AMD GCN GPUs running into issues, that was also a problem with our UE4 Linux benchmarking. The Catalyst 14.12 Omega driver wasn't working well with the Radeon HD 7000 series and newer for running these demos and ultimately would lock-up within a few minutes of testing. The Radeon HD 6000 series, however, worked out fine with Catalyst 14.12 on Linux and the four selected demos.

When it came to the proprietary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver (346.22), there were no issues at all to speak of with our Unreal Engine 4 testing atop Ubuntu 14.10. Everything was great, but that won't surprise any devout Linux gamers. So with our NVIDIA UE4 Linux tests I was able to run a wide-range of graphics cards from the newest GeForce 900 Maxwell GPUs all the way back to the GeForce 400 Fermi series without troubles.