The Tighter NVIDIA GeForce vs. AMD Radeon Linux Gaming Battle With 396.54 + Mesa 18.3-dev Drivers

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 28 August 2018 at 08:09 AM EDT. Page 5 of 5. 91 Comments.
Fresh NVIDIA Radeon Comparison On Linux - 22~23 August 2018
Fresh NVIDIA Radeon Comparison On Linux - 22~23 August 2018

The Thrones of Britannia performance on Linux now favors the NVIDIA driver stack clearly with the RX 580 on RADV coming up much slower than the GTX 1060 and the RX Vega 64 noticeably lower than the GTX 1070.

Fresh NVIDIA Radeon Comparison On Linux - 22~23 August 2018
Fresh NVIDIA Radeon Comparison On Linux - 22~23 August 2018

At least at 4K with low quality settings the RX 580 was now able to run close to the GTX 1060 and the RX Vega 64 in line with the GTX 1070.

Fresh NVIDIA Radeon Comparison On Linux - 22~23 August 2018

Lastly with Unigine Superposition, the RX 580 was coming up slower than the GTX 1060 but at least the RX Vega 64 still was able to come out in front of the GTX 1070.

Prior to the NVIDIA Linux driver resource fix, the past several months the Radeon RX 580 was performing much better than the GeForce GTX 1060 in many Linux games thanks to the many optimizations in recent years to this open-source driver stack by AMD, Valve, and other contributors. But now with this NVIDIA driver fix in place, the GeForce GTX 1060 is back to leading in more Linux game benchmarks but at least the Radeon RX 580 with its now mature RADV/RadeonSI driver support is able to at least provide stiff competition in a majority of the games tested. With these NVIDIA 396.54 and Mesa 18.3-dev Linux drivers, the RX Vega 64 is running mostly in line with the GeForce GTX 1070.

The GeForce GTX 1080 series remains much faster than the Radeon RX Vega 64 series on Linux for OpenGL/Vulkan and NVIDIA's lead is now only expanding with the recently announced GeForce RTX 2070/2080 series, which we are excited to see how they will perform under Linux once getting those graphics cards. Stay tuned for an interesting Linux graphics battle to come and as both the NVIDIA and AMD Linux drivers continue getting better as well as the Steam Play / Proton experience for Windows games on Linux under Steam, interesting times are ahead.

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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.