23-Way Graphics Card Comparison With Shadow of the Tomb Raider On Linux

Earlier this month Feral Interactive released the Linux port of Shadow of the Tomb Raider. For those wondering about the AMD Radeon vs. NVIDIA GeForce performance for this Vulkan-powered Linux game port, here are benchmark results on 23 different graphics cards.

The Linux port of Shadow of the Tomb Raider basically recommends at least an AMD GCN 1.2 or newer graphics card or GeForce GTX 680 or newer, basically the bare requirements on Linux for having a Vulkan driver out-of-the-box. It should also be possible getting a GCN 1.0/1.1 graphics card working if opting to use the AMDGPU DRM driver rather than Radeon DRM as needed for Vulkan driver support. But Feral recommends at least a Radeon RX 480 Polaris graphics card for decent performance. Current Intel graphics are not fast enough to run this game on Linux.

The Vulkan driver requirements are not too stiff unlike some of their earlier Vulkan-powered ports. Feral says at least the NVIDIA 418 driver series or Mesa 19.0.1+ are needed on the AMD side. These driver requirements are fairly relaxed and basically any Vulkan driver this year should be in decent shape, such as what is found by Ubuntu 19.04, Fedora 30, etc.

Other Linux system requirements are at least 8GB of RAM (though ideally 16GB), an Intel Core i3 minimum or Core i7 recommended, and at least Ubuntu 18.04 LTS in terms of other software components.