Follow-Up Tests For DIRT Showdown On Linux With AMD vs. NVIDIA

Compared to the earlier DiRT Linux results, at least now the GPUs are being pushed a bit harder with the 8x MSAA. With the previous results for 1080p ultra and 2x MSAA, the GTX 780 Ti was running much faster than all of the tested AMD Radeon GPUs. However, with the increase to 8x MSAA, the AMD GPUs now came in range of the GTX 780 Ti and GTX 970.

Given that the GTX 970 is a $350 graphics card, the Radeon R9 Fury Linux performance is still miserable with that $550 graphics card having the same frame-rate. The R9 Fury still ended up running a few frames slower than the mature Radeon R9 290 and R9 285... AMD Linux gamers can hope that a magical Catalyst update will come in the not too distant future.

For the high-end GeForce GTX 780 Ti and GTX 980 Ti and the AMD Radeon R9 Fury is where I then ran the system monitoring tests courtesy of the Phoronix Test Suite sensor tracking.

The CPU usage when the Radeon R9 Fury with Catalyst 15.7 was running Catalyst 15.7 was a few percent lower than the NVIDIA GPUs for this Core i7 5960X Haswell-E system. However, DiRT Showdown was still from being able to utilize the entire GPU, likely due to threading issues around the eON layer or other game issues.

The CPU frequency / performance state tended to jump around a lot under both the AMD and NVIDIA graphics drivers for this Ubuntu 15.04 x86_64 system with its default kernel (and settings, including the CPU scaling driver/governor).

The GPU usage as exposed by each of the respective binary drivers and recorded by the Phoronix Test Suite also showed the GPUs not reaching full utilization. On average the R9 Fury according to Catalyst was just being 36.5% utilized while the GTX 980 Ti was at 61% and the GTX 780 Ti at 70%.

The system memory usage was noticeably lower with the GTX 980 Ti on the NVIDIA 355 beta driver compared to the GTX 780 Ti or Radeon R9 Fury on Catalyst 15.7.

Well, those are just the latest numbers to share today based on my latest DiRT Showdown Linux benchmarking in looking at the AMD and NVIDIA binary drivers. Once again, if you appreciate all of our Linux benchmarking and hardware reviews at Phoronix.com -- most of which are exclusive for Linux -- please consider supporting our work by subscribing to Phoronix Premium or making a PayPal tip. Or please just view Phoronix without any ad-block/no-script blockers given that Phoronix is primarily driven -- and made possible -- by advertisements in order to cover expenses and being able to continue in these Linux hardware testing efforts full-time along with the open-source development of the Phoronix Test Suite.