17-Way Linux Graphics Card Comparison With Civilization Beyond Earth

The Civilization Beyond Earth Linux performance is clearly better with the NVIDIA Linux driver, as Aspyr Media and other Linux game developers have sided with for a while. The AMD Catalyst driver was clearly running into some bottleneck that caused it top out at 33~34 FPS with no change in performance between the Radeon HD 7950 and Radeon R9 290. Meanwhile, the NVIDIA hardware was topping out almost twice as fast. The Radeon R9 290 was basically running around the speed of the GeForce GTX 750 Ti under Linux. To no surprise, the GeForce GTX 980 was the fastest graphics card tested under Ubuntu Linux.

The peak frame latencies between the NVIDIA and AMD hardware with their Linux drivers were roughly in line, aside from the pre-GCN Radeon GPUs struggling a fair bit and then the low-end GeForce GT 610 being the worst.