NVIDIA vs. AMD Linux GPU Performance For THRONES OF BRITANNIA
This morning Feral Interactive released A Total War Saga: THRONES OF BRITANNIA for Linux gamers. This Linux port of A Total War Saga: THRONES OF BRITANNIA is powered by the Vulkan graphics API rather than OpenGL and makes for an interesting test subject. Here are our initial benchmarks of this game under Ubuntu Linux with a range of AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.
Here is our first look at the A Total War Saga: THRONES OF BRITANNIA Linux performance with an assortment of Radeon and GeForce graphics cards while testing at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K with a variety of visual quality settings.
As a reminder, the minimum supported GPU is a Radeon R9 285 or GeForce GTX 680 while they recommend at least a Radeon RX 480 or GeForce GTX 970. The NVIDIA 390+ and Mesa 18.0+ for RADV are the supported Linux Vulkan driver configurations.
These tests were done using the NVIDIA 396.24 Linux driver for the tested GeForce graphics cards while the Radeon GPUs were tested using RADV from Mesa 18.2 Git built against LLVM 7.0 SVN with Linux 4.17. In my testing thus far, I didn't run into any rendering issues or problems with either NVIDIA or AMD on the respective drivers tested.
The graphics cards tested for this initial comparison included the:
- GeForce GTX 1060
- GeForce GTX 1070
- GeForce GTX 1070 Ti
- GeForce GTX 1080
- GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
- Radeon R9 270X
- Radeon R9 290
- Radeon RX 560
- Radeon RX 580
- Radeon R9 Fury
- Radeon RX Vega 56
- Radeon RX Vega 64
With the GCN 1.0/1.1 era hardware, they did work for this game but obviously you need to ensure your system is booted using the AMDGPU DRM driver for RADV Vulkan driver compatibility than the default Radeon DRM driver.
All of the testing was done with an Intel Core i7 8700K system running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with the Linux 4.17 Git kernel and then Mesa 18.2-dev + LLVM 7.0 on the AMD side and the NVIDIA 396.24 driver for the GeForce graphics processors.
A comparison with even more graphics cards as well as including per-frame-time information and more details will be published in the days ahead on Phoronix as time allows and still getting the new automated new test profile into position for the Phoronix Test Suite (the tests today were facilitated via their menuing system). So if you are interested in this game but concerned about your GPU performance, stay tuned for more benchmarks in the days ahead.