AMD Catalyst Gaming Performance For BioShock Infinite On Linux

This week BioShock Infinite was finally released for Linux and thanks to this AAA game having good support for automated Linux benchmarking, I've been running some tests over the past two days. In this article is a look at the AMD Catalyst Linux performance for BioShock Infinite while another article in the next few days will compare the graphics card results to the NVIDIA GeForce line-up on Ubuntu, once completed.

With BioShock Infinite having suitable automated benchmarking support, I ran some basic tests of the game on a variety of modern graphics cards. BioShock Infinite is only compatible with the proprietary NVIDIA/AMD graphics drivers so the open-source drivers are sadly left out for the time being until Mesa/Gallium3D has advanced enough. The Linux system requirements for this game mention a Radeon HD 7000 series or newer graphics card is required on the AMD side but for this Phoronix testing I took things back to the Radeon HD 6000 series.

Overall things panned out fine when testing the Catalyst 15.3 Beta on Ubuntu 15.04 64-bit for this game. There were a few lock-ups, but when rebooting the system, the tests tended to complete for each of the graphics cards. For this initial round of BioShock Infinite Linux testing, the game was set to using ultra quality settings and tested at both 1920 x 1080 and 2560 x 1600. The lower image quality settings for the game weren't tested in this round as regardless at 1920 x 1080 the game seemed to be CPU bottlenecked with initial testing not delivering much in the way of FPS differences between low and ultra.

All benchmarks were facilitated via the Phoronix Test Suite by running phoronix-test-suite benchmark bioshock-infinite. If you appreciate this Linux game benchmarking of BioShock Infinite and wish to see more interesting articles in the future, please highly consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium or making a PayPal tip. Thank you for your support to make this possible!