Intel Celeron/Pentium/Core i3/i5/i7 - NVIDIA vs. AMD Linux Gaming Performance

First up was BioShock Infinite. For this game the GTX 1050 was faster than the R9 Fury and RX 480 on RadeonSI Mesa 17.1-devel and even when using a Celeron CPU. For the R9 Fury when going from the Celeron G3930 to Core i7 7700K the performance increased by 65%. With the GTX 1080 when going from the Celeron to i7-7700K the performance rose by 69%. As you can see from these results for this particular game, the biggest increase in performance happened when going from the Celeron G3930 to Pentium G4600 while the next greatest increase was going from the Core i5 7600K to Core i7 7700K, for all five graphics cards tested.

With Counter-Strike: Global Offensive the CPU plays a much greater role with going from a Celeron to Core i7 7700K with these GPUs yielding double or in some cases even closer to triple the frame-rate. When going from the Core i3 7100 to Core i5 7600K is where the GTX 1060/1080 jumped ahead from no being less CPU-bound.

The Dota 2 OpenGL results were also interesting and show the impact on the CPUs with the different Radeon/GeForce GPU options for this fresh round of Linux benchmarking.

The Vulkan results were particularly interesting and illustrated a problem of sorts for the RADV Vulkan driver with the R9 Fury if you look at how for the Core i5/i7 CPUs the performance actually dropped compared to the Pentium / Core i3 runs. If any Phoronix readers have ideas there what might be going on, feel free to chime in on the forums.