Extra Steam Linux Gaming Benchmarks Of The AMD Radeon RX 480

Our just-published 12-page AMD Radeon RX 480 Linux review features a wealth of interesting OpenGL/OpenCL/Vulkan Linux benchmarks along with performance-per-Watt and performance-per-dollar metrics and more. Check it out if you haven't already. This article are just some extra Steam Linux gaming benchmarks for the RX 480 vs. various NVIDIA graphics cards in the games that can't be fully-automated like Tomb Raider, Shadow of Mordor, and Company of Heroes 2 where the benchmarks had to be manually executed.

For Phoronix Premium readers I carried out these manual tests with a few extra games so far (premium fans: let me know if there's any other tests you'd like to see!) of the Radeon RX 480 vs. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 / 970 / 980 / 980 Ti / 1070 / 1080. The RX 480 tests were done both with AMDGPU-PRO 16.30.3 and then Linux 4.7 Git + Mesa 12.1-dev Git on the open-source side. The NVIDIA driver was with 367.27; using the same system as this morning's complete RX 480 review.

As for why these results were kept to a separate article and needing to run the tests manually, see The Importance Of Benchmark Automation & Why I Hate Running Linux Games Manually.

With the recently released Tomb Raider for Linux, it's good to see both AMDGPU-PRO and RadeonSI working even though Feral still has the "unsupported" prompt when firing up the game. The RadeonSI performance with Mesa Git was actually superior to AMDGPU-PRO 16.30 for the RX 480. The RX 480 open-source support was coming up just shy of the GeForce GTX 970.

While the Tomb Raider results were getting me excited about the RadeonSI performance level, the Mesa-based driver took a severe dive with Shadow of Mordor. With AMDGPU-PRO though, the RX 480 was able to still run just shy of the GTX 970.

Regardless of the AMD driver, the Radeon RX 480 ran short of the GeForce GTX 960 with Company of Heroes 2.

Again, great to see same-day support out of AMD for both the fully open-source stack and the PRO hybrid driver. The Radeon RX 480 continues to perform between a GTX 960 and GTX 970 most of the time, but in the complete Linux review there are cases shown where the RX 480 can run past a GTX 980. The performance-per-Watt and performance-per-dollar is the real story with today's graphics card launch. Read the full review if you haven't already.