AMD vs. NVIDIA Linux Gaming Performance For DiRT Showdown

The Phoronix Test Suite test profile for this game exposes the preset options of low/high/ultra that match the setting configurations from the in-game graphical options. There's also exposed the various resolutions. However, DiRT/eON seems to be quite peculiar about the resolution handling. From a 4K display, I was able to run the tests fine at 1080p, but when trying to run the game at 3840 x 2160, the XML configuration file would be reset by the game and fallback to running at 1280 x 800. So while originally I planned to run 1080p and 4K tests for this article, in the end I was left with just the 1920 x 1080 results. However, the low/high/ultra image quality settings -- while using 2x MSAA and the other defaults of the game, were tested. Upon request, the test profile could be modified to also allow testing the different anti-aliasing options as exposed by the game, etc. See Automated Benchmarking With DiRT Showdown On Linux for more information.

Aside from the odd resolution handling issue, the port overall seemed fairly okay. However, while running the benchmarks with the latest drivers, on a few random cases I did run into problems with the game while loading. Those problems were worked around by just killing the E.runloop process and restarting the test, but it only happened a handful of times from among the dozens of times tested (given that for each graphics card and each option the test is run multiple times, etc).