Total War: WARHAMMER III Linux Performance Across 24 NVIDIA / AMD GPUs

Last week Feral Interactive released Total War: WARHAMMER III for Linux as a native port of this game that debuted earlier this year on Windows. This latest Total War game port to Linux by Feral relies on the Vulkan API for graphics and comes with a modest system requirements. For those curious about the performance of this latest high profile game port, here are benchmarks across 24 different AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards on Ubuntu Linux.

For those curious about the GPU requirements for this native Linux game port and whether NVIDIA or AMD Vulkan drivers hold a particular advantage for this newly-released Linux game, the past week I have been carrying out the two dozen graphics card tests. The selection was based on the recent graphics cards I had available for testing.

The Linux system requirements for this game port state a minimum of a GeForce GTX 970 GPU or Radeon RX 470 while recommending at least a GeForce GTX 1070 or AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT. Total War: WARHAMMER III on Windows has a minimum of the GeForce GTX 900 / AMD Radeon RX 400 series or a recommendation of the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti / Radeon RX 5600 XT, so with the Linux port there is slightly higher system requirements. On Windows the game is rendered using Direct3D 11. Feral has tested this game on Linux to work with the NVIDIA 470 series driver and later or Mesa 21.0.3 and newer -- no particularly tight driver requirements with most Linux gamers likely already being on far newer releases.

With the 24 graphics cards, benchmarks were carried out at 1080p / 1440p / 4K over a mix of graphics settings. All tests were done on an Intel Core i9 12900K Alder Lake system running Ubuntu 22.04 with the Linux 5.18 kernel. Mesa 22.2-devel from the Oibaf PPA was used for the Radeon testing while the NVIDIA 515.48.07 proprietary driver was used with all of the GeForce graphics cards. The tested graphics cards for this Total War: WARHAMMER III Linux benchmarking included:

- GTX 1070
- GTX 1660 SUPER
- RTX 2060
- RTX 2060 SUPER
- RTX 2080 SUPER
- TITAN RTX
- RTX 3060
- RTX 3060 Ti
- RTX 3070
- RTX 3070 Ti
- RTX 3080
- RTX 3080 Ti
- RTX 3090
- RX 590
- RX Vega 56
- Radeon VII
- RX 5500 XT
- RX 5700 XT
- RX 6600
- RX 6600 XT
- RX 6700 XT
- RX 6750 XT
- RX 6800
- RX 6800 XT

Due to settings handling differences for ensuring comparability and automation, just the native Linux game port was tested. WARHAMMER III has been available for use as well via Steam Play (Proton).