Core i7 8700K vs. Ryzen 7 2700X With Rise of The Tomb Raider On Linux

Here are our latest Linux gaming benchmarks comparing the Intel Core i7 8700K to the newly-released Ryzen 7 2700X. The focus in this article is on the Rise of the Tomb Raider Linux port released last week by Feral Interactive and powered by Vulkan.

Last week were some basic Linux gaming benchmarks with the Zen+ CPUs vs. Intel though for the most part the i7-8700K was still leading. Since our original Ryzen 5 2600X + Ryzen 7 2700X Linux benchmarks I did discover that an updated ASUS BIOS does significantly help with the CPU performance. I have repeated the same Linux gaming benchmarks from last week, but long story short there wasn't any real difference compared to the original results. The updated BIOS/AGESA appears to primarily help with CPU heavy workloads and those that are multi-threaded, unfortunately of which there aren't too many Linux games that are quite thread friendly. But in this article is our first look at the new Linux port of Rise of the Tomb Raider while testing on these latest Intel/AMD CPUs. AMD also notified us we will be receiving Ryzen 5 2600 and Ryzen 7 2700 (non-X models) for Linux benchmarking shortly on Phoronix.

With Rise of the Tomb Raider on Linux, the tests were done with a Radeon RX 580 and RX Vega 64 graphics cards while using the Linux 4.16.2 kernel and Mesa 18.1-dev atop an Ubuntu 17.10 x86_64 installation. The Core i7 8700K was running with the ASUS PRIME Z370-A motherboard and the Ryzen 7 2700X using the ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR VII HERO (the new 0509 BIOS). The systems were tested with the same 2 x 8GB DDR4-3200MHz Corsair memory, and Samsung 950 PRO 256NVMe SSD host OS drive + 525GB Crucial CT525MX3 Linux Steam game drive.

These tests were done with Rise of the Tomb Raider, which only supports Vulkan on Linux for rendering. The tests were automated via the Phoronix Test Suite.