17-Way Linux Graphics Card Comparison With Civilization Beyond Earth

With using a mixture of retail GPUs from various AIBs as well as a number of NVIDIA engineering samples, the GPU thermal results were all over the board but no GPU was getting too hot while running Civilization Beyond Earth with the proprietary Linux drivers.

Given the current results with the Catalyst 14.12 Omega driver, AMD still clearly has a ways to go in improving their driver's performance for Civilization: Beyond Earth on Linux. The Radeon R9 290 was running this strategy game at roughly the speed of a GeForce GTX 750 Ti when each were using their latest proprietary Linux blobs. The game was certainly demanding at 1080p with high quality settings on Linux and it took the GTX 780/970/980 to run at just under 60 FPS. Hopefully in early 2015 we'll see better supported drivers from all parties -- just not from AMD but NVIDIA too as well as the open-source drivers -- for this game and the other latest Linux native games via Steam on Linux. As soon as new drivers are released and separately when the open-source drivers are in a better state, you can be sure to find some more Civilization: Beyond Earth Linux benchmarks at Phoronix.

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