CS:GO & TF2 Extensively Tested On The Newest Open-Source Radeon Linux Driver
The latest massive set of Linux test data we have to share with Linux gamers and enthusiasts is a look at Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Team Fortress 2 when using the very newest open-source Radeon graphics driver code. The very latest open-source Radeon driver code tested with these popular Valve Linux games were the Linux 3.18 Git kernel, Mesa 10.4-devel, LLVM 3.6 SVN, and xf86-video-ati 7.5.99. With this bleeding edge code there were sixteen AMD Radeon graphics cards tested from low to high-end and spanning several generations. Beyond looking at the frame-rate results, there's also power consumption, performance-per-Watt, GPU core temperature, and CPU usage to go along with all of these results.
With the open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver continuing to advance at an exciting rate, our latest Steam Linux testing with these drivers is looking at arguably two of the native Linux games most exciting to penguin gamers right now: Counter-Strike: Global Offensive that was only recently released for Linux and then the still very popular Team Fortress 2. At least these are arguably the most interesting/popular Linux games right now that we're able to automate for meeting requirements for standardized, completely reproducible, and transparent benchmarking.
With the two games being benchmarked via the Phoronix Test Suite (running phoronix-test-suite benchmark csgo tf2), several system vitals were monitored as well using our open-source benchmarking software. Via the MONITOR=sys.power,cpu.usage,gpu.temp and PERFORMANCE_PER_WATT=1 environment variables, the CPU usage, AC system power consumption, and GPU core temperatures were monitored for each GPU during testing. The performance-per-Watt results were also auto-generated for finding the most efficient graphics card among the hardware tested. The AC power consumption was monitored using a USB-based WattsUp Pro.
Ubuntu 14.10 64-bit was the base operating system used during this latest OpenGL benchmarking but I had upgraded to the Linux 3.18 Git kernel from this weekend, switched over to using the Xfce 4.10 desktop (although my latest cross-desktop testing has shown minimal difference between Unity, Xfce, and others in a modern setting), forced the Intel P-State performance CPU scaling governor, and updating the user-space drivers via this PPA. The PPA ships Mesa 10.4-devel Git and xf86-video-ati 7.5.99 Git while also packaging a weekly snapshot of LLVM 3.6 for the latest AMD GPU back-end support.