Radeon vs. NVIDIA With Windows 10 & Ubuntu Linux

Now onto the more interesting game tests....

First up was Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, which was brought to Linux by Feral Interactive and in the process going from D3D11 to OpenGL. Under Ubuntu, the GTX 1060 and GTX 1080 are faster than the RX 580 and RX Vega 64, but under Windows, the Radeon cards were faster. In this first scenario, the GTX 1060 on Linux is running at 74% the speed of Windows and the GTX 1060 at 66% while the RX 580 was at 60% and the RX Vega 64 just at 53% the speed of Windows.

With ultra quality settings, NVIDIA remained faster on Linux while AMD was faster on Windows. Here the Radeon performance is 59~66% the speed of Windows when using the latest Linux drivers while NVIDIA was at about 80%. Even though NVIDIA's drivers rely upon a shared code-base across platforms, there is significant overhead in Linux game ports, particularly in going from Direct3D to OpenGL.

Starting off with F1 2017, which for the Linux port is running on Vulkan rather than Direct3D, the NVIDIA Linux performance is slightly faster than the Radeon Linux numbers with RADV. While under Windows, the RX 580 was faster than the GTX 1060 but the GTX 1080 was much faster than the RX Vega 64. Here the GTX 1080 and RX 580 / RX Vega 64 are running at about ~77% their speed on Linux as it does on Windows while the GTX 1060 was at 87%.

With ultra image quality settings, the Radeon vs. NVIDIA Linux numbers were more competitive while Radeon was faster on Windows. Here the NVIDIA Linux performance was around 90% of the Windows frame-rates.