20-Way Linux Graphics Card Comparison For Total War: Three Kingdoms

Total War: Three Kingdoms is the newest Linux game port from Feral Interactive and saw a same-day release back in May. While back then it was said there weren't benchmarking capabilities for this game, there now is a test profile. For those wondering how Three Kingdoms performs on Linux, here is a twenty way graphics card comparison using the newest AMD Radeon and NVIDIA drivers.

Total War: Three Kingdoms is rendered on Linux using Vulkan and for the minimum GPU requirements for this game is a Radeon R9 285 or GeForce GTX 680. Feral recommends though a Radeon RX 480 / GeForce GTX 970 or better for the best gaming experience. On Windows meanwhile the recommended cards are a GeForce GTX 970 or Radeon R9 Fury X.

The cards tested based upon what I had available (unfortunately no NVIDIA SUPER cards) include:

- GTX 1060
- GTX 1070
- GTX 1070 Ti
- GTX 1080
- GTX 1080 Ti
- GTX 1660
- GTX 1660 Ti
- RTX 2060
- RTX 2070
- RTX 2080
- RTX 2080 Ti
- TITAN RTX
- R9 Fury
- RX 580
- RX 590
- RX Vega 56
- RX Vega 64
- Radeon VII
- RX 5700
- RX 5700 XT

This initial round of Total War: Three Kingdoms Linux benchmarking was done with an Intel Core i9 9900K desktop running Ubuntu 19.04 with the Linux 5.3 Git kernel. On the NVIDIA side was their newest 435.17 driver while on the AMD side was Mesa 19.2-devel built against LLVM 9.0.

In addition to looking at the raw performance, there are also power consumption data and performance-per-dollar metrics based on the current retail GPU pricing.