20-Way GPU Gaming Comparison With March 2020 Linux Drivers

Given the continuously evolving state of the open-source Radeon Linux graphics drivers in particular, here are fresh AMD Radeon vs. NVIDIA GeForce Linux gaming benchmarks with the latest Linux graphics drivers as we begin March 2020. Besides the latest NVIDIA 440.64 Linux driver, on the Radeon side was Mesa 20.1-devel paired with the Linux 5.5.5 kernel and also having the RADV ACO back-end enabled.

This comparison is intended to provide the latest look at the Linux gaming performance against an assortment of current AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards. The twenty graphics cards tested this round included:

- GTX 1070
- GTX 1080 Ti
- GTX 1650 SUPER
- GTX 1660 SUPER
- RTX 2060
- RTX 2060 SUPER
- RTX 2070
- RTX 2070 SUPER
- RTX 2080
- RTX 2080 SUPER
- RTX 2080 Ti
- TITAN RTX
- Radeon RX 590
- Radeon RX Vega 56
- Radeon RX Vega 64
- Radeon RX 5500 XT
- Radeon RX 5600 XT
- Radeon RX 5700
- Radeon RX 5700 XT
- Radeon VII

Linux 5.5.5 was running on all of the systems while on the NVIDIA side was their 440.64 proprietary stack and for the Radeon GPUs was Mesa 20.1-devel built against LLVM 10.0 (via the Oibaf PPA) while also having the RADV ACO back-end enabled for the Vulkan tests.

All the testing was done from the same Ryzen 9 3950X system. Via the Phoronix Test Suite a wide range of Linux gaming benchmarks were carried out including some new titles thanks to using the new Proton 5.0 for the Steam Play testing.