10-Way NVIDIA GeForce Linux Vulkan Performance For F1 2017

Update: Head on over to Radeon RADV vs. NVIDIA Vulkan Performance For F1 2017 On Linux for both the initial NVIDIA GeForce and Radeon F1 2017 Linux benchmark results using new tests.

Today marked the Linux release of F1 2017, which was ported by Feral Interactive and with this port it went from being a Direct3D 11 game on Windows to exclusively making use of the Vulkan graphics API on Linux. Radeon GPU benchmarks are still ongoing, but for these launch-day benchmarks, here are F1 2017 performance numbers on Ubuntu Linux with a variety of GeForce graphics cards.

When it comes to this Linux port of F1 2017, Feral Interactive states a minimum of the GeForce GTX 680 but recommend a GeForce GTX 1070 for an optimal experience. The GeForce 600 series is the minimum for this game on Linux due to these Kepler GPUs being the earliest NVIDIA supports with their Vulkan driver. Feral recommends using the NVIDIA 384 driver series for now when playing this game as there are some current regressions with the 387 series up through 387.22. For our benchmarking, the 384.90 driver was used on Ubuntu 17.04 x86_64.

The NVIDIA Linux experience was indeed very good for this racing game, as we'd expect out of NVIDIA's proprietary driver. In the nine hours of benchmarking so far, there was just one situation of the game crashing and it appeared to just be a freak coincidence as when testing other cards and settings, it only ever happened once. There were also no rendering issues or other problems encountered during the testing thus far.

Feral kindly contributed a new F1 2017 test profile for the Phoronix Test Suite for making use of the game's built-in automated benchmark and exposed for a variety of resolutions and quality levels. Due to the short time today, tests were done just at 1080p and 4K with low, high, and ultra high image quality settings.

The graphics cards I have had time to benchmark so far included the:

- GeForce GTX 680
- GeForce GTX 760
- GeForce GTX 780 Ti
- GeForce GTX 960
- GeForce GTX 980 Ti
- GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
- GeForce GTX 1060
- GeForce GTX 1070
- GeForce GTX 1080
- GeForce GTX 1080 Ti

All of these graphics cards were tested from the Core i7 8700K Coffee Lake system running Ubuntu 17.04 x86_64 with the 384.90 Vulkan driver.

Expect the full Radeon RADV report for F1 2017 on Phoronix on Friday. Let's get straight to our NVIDIA GeForce performance data for this newest Linux racing game.

Notice (3 Nov): Feral discovered in their test script that some settings may not be applied as expected. They have supplied a fix and new NVIDIA/Radeon tests are being worked on that will be coming in the upcoming Radeon tests.

Update: Head on over to Radeon RADV vs. NVIDIA Vulkan Performance For F1 2017 On Linux for both the initial NVIDIA GeForce and Radeon F1 2017 Linux benchmark results using new tests.