High-End NVIDIA GeForce vs. AMD Radeon Linux Gaming Comparison

The first benchmark up was Half-Life 2: Lost Coast. With all of these high-end graphics cards on the proprietary drivers they were averaging hundreds of frames per second, but Phoronix readers tend to always insist on seeing Source Engine game results... The fastest graphics card tested was the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti, as expected. The Radeon R9 290 graphics card meanwhile was just running about the speed of a GeForce GTX 770. For reference, the GTX 770 retails for just about $330 USD while the Radeon R9 290 still commands a retail price above $400 USD.

Reaction Quake 3 obviously runs on all modern graphics cards with absolute ease. These results are just being shown to point out that the AMD Radeon performance with Catalyst on Linux was overall much lower than with the NVIDIA GeForce Linux driver. The Radeon R9 290 performance was poor and came in even slower than the HD 7950, which in turn was running at the speed of a GeForce GTX 760. The NVIDIA Linux driver tends to be more CPU efficient than Catalyst on Linux.

When running Unigine Heaven, the GTX 780 Ti and TITAN had the big wins over all of the other hardware. The AMD Radeon R9 290 was still just running about the speed of the GeForce GTX 770 under Linux, a graphics card that costs much less than the R9 290 Hawaii GPU. The R9 290 was also just a small step-up over the GTX 680.