Intel Core i3, i5, i7 With NVIDIA vs. AMD Radeon For Linux Gaming

For those wondering which Intel Coffeelake processors would make the most sense for a Linux gaming rig, I took the new Core i3 8100, Core i5 8400, and Core i7 8700K processors and tested them each with two Radeon and two NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards for looking at the overall Linux OpenGL/Vulkan gaming performance.

With the Intel i3-8100, i5-8400, and i7-8700K, the Radeon RX Vega 64 and RX 580 were tested for representing AMD's offerings for Linux gaming while on the NVIDIA side was the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and GTX 1060. The AMD Linux driver stack was the latest AMDGPU DC tree targeting Linux 4.15 / DRM-Next paired with the Padoka PPA providing Mesa 17.3-dev built against LLVM 6.0 SVN. On the NVIDIA Linux driver side was the 387.12 beta driver. Thus we have a look at the NVIDIA vs. AMD Linux gaming performance with low through high-end Intel CPUs.

Tests were done with Ubuntu 17.04 x86_64, albeit with the driver upgrades. Unfortunately the latest Radeon Git code is still a bit buggy, so for some of the Linux gaming tests they were limited to NVIDIA-only when resulting in Radeon freezes or crashes. This set of 12 CPU/GPU combination tests with a wide variety of games were run in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.

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