20-Way Intel/AMD/NVIDIA GPU Comparison With Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

As explained in the earlier article, no Source Engine / Steam tests were done in this article due to XCB DRI3 issues when trying to launch Steam games on the open drivers. For some closed-source Steam on Linux game tests see last week's 15-way Radeon/GeForce Source Engine Linux comparison.

For nearly all of the tested graphics cards, their frame-rates were generally multiple times higher than a 60 FPS average... The OpenArena 0.8.5 results aren't too meaningful for game-play but just for showing that the AMD Radeon graphics cards were performing much better than all of the tested NVIDIA Fermi/Kepler graphics cards due to Nouveau's lack of suitable re-clocking support. All of the modern NVIDIA GPUs are severely handicapped by Nouveau due to being limited to their boot clock frequencies. End-user-ready re-clocking is still likely months away.

The Intel HD Graphics 4600 performance for the i7-4770K came up shy of the under-clocked NVIDIA hardware but about twice as fast as the Radeon HD 6450 on its R600g driver. As explained in last week's Radeon article, a very odd R7 260X performance issue is present only when using the open-source driver and it doesn't appear re-clocking related and will run fine with Catalyst.