CS:GO & TF2 Benchmarks Updated For Linux

With yesterday's review of the GeForce GTX 950 on Linux you may have noticed the Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive tests weren't present, even though they're among the most popular Linux games.

These games were left out since when setting up the test system for the assortment of AMD/NVIDIA graphics card tests, it turns out recent Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive updates broke support for the pre-existing time demo tests. With the demos we've been using in all of the CS:GO/TF2 benchmarks for the past year or so, a recent update changed/removed some shaders and caused issues for these demos. Thus the tests failed to run.

I've now gotten around to recording some new demos for benchmarking these two popular Valve games. So next time you're running phoronix-test-suite benchmark tf2 csgo it will resort to updating to the new test profile that includes the demos working against the latest versions of these games available via Steam... Just the latest example of why I don't like benchmarking with Steam -- at least until they allow an option for fetching some previous revision of a game (i.e. in order to ensure the same game version is always tested either via some revision hash or version identifier or other means), these games in demo form are available outside of Steam where the package/binary can be preserved, or other methods for ensuring comparability of Steam-based games just not locally but across the Internet for others wishing to reproduce our benchmark results while ensuring it's a carefully maintained environment. It's also useful if wanting to go back months or years later and trying to run a sort of historical comparison. At least thanks to the versioning of test profiles on the Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org side, it knows a break has occurred and to not compare old CS:GO/TF2 results to any newly generated data.

Anyhow, I digress. The Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Team Fortress 2 tests should be working for the next round of Linux hardware comparisons on Phoronix. The next planned GPU comparison is the separate AMD and NVIDIA Linux articles for looking at the best value / performance-per-dollar for Linux performance benchmarking.