15-Way AMD/NVIDIA Graphics Card Comparison For 4K Linux Gaming

[mao_dze_dun]

Good job, Michael. I've been waiting to see a mega AAA game test like this one. Sadly as usual AMD sucks badly. I really don't see them showing some good performance before HBM 2.0 which hopefully will be so fast it would be able to compensate for their crap drivers . Unless they go bankrupt by then. Or Microsoft/Samsung/Valve/Foxconn/Insert-any-other-name buys them.

[vein]

Did you read the article?

I did...but I am not having any rendering issue with 290 + catalyst 15.7. Works very smoothly for me... But it isn't the first time I got better Catalyst results at home than you show in the tests...

[chithanh]

all my GCN GPUs except for the R7 370 (supplied by MSI) were bought by Phoronix Media.

Really? I thought you got one or more cards from Sapphire too.

e.g. mentioned here:

Sapphire kindly sent over the Radeon R7 260X earlier this month

[xeekei]

Did you read the article?

Nah, I think people just look at the graphs. I do that too sometimes, but at least I will stop to read first if there's something I don't understand before I post.

[Michael]

Either Civilization BE is optimized for AMD (which wouldn't surprise me seeing as it supported Mantle on Windows) or it is broken and is not rendering properly.

Did you read the article?

[SXX⁣]

Wonder what the trouble is here

Problem with Civ BE is simpe: unlike Civ5 it doesn't have D3D9 path and what Aspyr have for D3D1x -> OpenGL translation is just less effective at moment.

Aspyr's Borderlands port works great.

This game is using Unreal Engine that was designed to be cross-platform and effectively use a lot of different graphical APIs. And Civilization series is PC exclusive where GPU performance isn't that important. E.g CPU bottlenecks and networking are far more important so I suppose both developers and Aspyr worry about them the most.

[profoundWHALE]

Either Civilization BE is optimized for AMD (which wouldn't surprise me seeing as it supported Mantle on Windows) or it is broken and is not rendering properly. If it is the former, then it goes to show you that most of the games on Linux are performing much like Project Cars on Windows. If the latter, then it also wouldn't surprise me and AMD's probably going to fix a lot of it when Vulkan is released.

That being said, if Intel does very well with their integrated graphics and AMD is just having a hard time doubling that with say, dedicated GPUs, then they're having some serious issues.

[justmy2cents]

Hm... those numbers are pretty disappointing, seeing as Civ Beyond Earth is a native port by a trusted Linux developer (Aspyr), and it has roughly halved performance versus Windows (at least on a Titan X): http://www.anandtech.com/show/9059/t...tan-x-review/8.

I'm assuming that if you were running this on a stock Ubuntu system then unredirecting fullscreen windows in compiz was enabled (even though it tends to be broken for nVidia currently and causes tearing: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...z/+bug/1307144), so I'm not sure what other performance bottlenecks there might be. I expect some amount of performance penalty just given most devs' increased familiarity with DirectX and ability to write more efficient code, but this is a little worse than I expected. I'm going to think twice about getting a larger-than-1080p monitor anytime soon -- though I doubt even Wayland and Vulkan are going to be a silver bullet here.

there is one more question to consider. i think all Aspyr ported games benefit greatly with __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS=1 while eON supplies that in startup script.. i know that at least both Borderlands games get almost double performance

as far as Vulkan. Vulkan is practical 1:1 with DX12 since both are using same principles from Mantle. one would expect performance will be as well, at least due to the fact that it is not driver implementing complex methods.

OpenGL and DX on the other hand are completely different, which results in ports being slower.

[axfelix]

Hm, on checking, it looks like Metro Last Light is actually pretty competitive for Windows vs. Linux even at mega-high resolutions:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...ti,4164-5.html

Though I know that "high settings" for those games probably differ across platforms due to the different implementations of MSAA/SSAA, I guess this isn't actually a driver issue, actually just a "Civ doesn't translate to OpenGL well" issue. Heck, with that kind of disparity, if Civ didn't require DX10+, I'd actually expect it to run better through Wine (I think I remember that being the case for Civ 5, which has a DX9 mode, when Aspyr first released their port). Wonder what the trouble is here -- Aspyr's Borderlands port works great.

[axfelix]

Hm... those numbers are pretty disappointing, seeing as Civ Beyond Earth is a native port by a trusted Linux developer (Aspyr), and it has roughly halved performance versus Windows (at least on a Titan X): http://www.anandtech.com/show/9059/t...tan-x-review/8.

I'm assuming that if you were running this on a stock Ubuntu system then unredirecting fullscreen windows in compiz was enabled (even though it tends to be broken for nVidia currently and causes tearing: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...z/+bug/1307144), so I'm not sure what other performance bottlenecks there might be. I expect some amount of performance penalty just given most devs' increased familiarity with DirectX and ability to write more efficient code, but this is a little worse than I expected. I'm going to think twice about getting a larger-than-1080p monitor anytime soon -- though I doubt even Wayland and Vulkan are going to be a silver bullet here.