Updated NVIDIA GeForce Benchmarks On Ubuntu Linux With Team Fortress 2

For those curious how Valve's popular Team Fortress 2 game is performing atop the Source Engine with Ubuntu 13.10 and the latest NVIDIA Linux drivers, here's updated benchmarks as we compare nine graphics cards spanning several GeForce generations.

Sadly it's not often we benchmark Team Fortress 2 and some of Valve's other popular Source Engine games on Linux. The reasons for not using these tests often were clearly outlined within Finally, Team Fortress 2 Benchmarks For Phoronix. The issues primarily comes down to benchmarking via Steam doesn't work too well in meeting our high standards for benchmarking reproducibility and automation. With Steam games auto-updating there isn't an easy way to force specific revisions of a game to be used for comparisons across time and amongst users, the process is more difficult to automate fully, etc. Contrary to the belief of some readers, it isn't at all a matter of the game not being open-source, etc. With that said there is the TF2 test profile hosted on OpenBenchmarking.org for the Phoronix Test Suite. Assuming you have the 13GB+ game installed via Steam in the standard installation path, simply running phoronix-test-suite benchmark tf2 will benchmark the latest revision of the free-to-play game and report the results within our industry-leading open-source benchmarking and automated testing platform.

Running many different Linux GPU tests for an upcoming graphics card review, and in enjoying my birthday toying with hardware and working on many Linux benchmarks, I decided to run some fresh Team Fortress 2 benchmarks on Ubuntu 13.10 Linux with the NVIDIA 331.20 graphics driver. The results are shared in this article while in the coming days will be results for AMD Radeon graphics cards on Linux with the Catalyst driver. Open-source GPU driver results may also potentially come in a later article too.