Strange Brigade Is Running Well On Linux Via Steam Play - Benchmarks With 22 NVIDIA/AMD Graphics Cards

Strange Brigade is a third-person shooter game released last August for Microsoft Windows and game consoles. This game is powered by Rebellion Developments' Asura Engine and while there is no native Linux port, is running well on Linux via Steam Play. Here are benchmarks with twenty-two different graphics cards looking at the current performance on Ubuntu Linux.

A Phoronix reader pointed out that Strange Brigade is now running on Linux. While I hadn't been familiar with the game myself, it was pointed out that it's benchmark-friendly and meets my requirements around benchmarking. After picking up the game, I was indeed pleased to see this latest title running so smoothly along the likes of F1 2018 and DiRT Rally 2.0. I ran some initial benchmarks of this game when using Ubuntu 19.04 with the Linux 5.0 kernel and testing with Mesa 19.1-devel (via the Padoka PPA) on the Radeon graphics cards and the NVIDIA 430.09 beta driver with the GeForce GPUs.

The graphics cards I used for testing based upon availability included:

- Radeon R9 285
- Radeon R9 Fury
- Radeon RX 560
- Radeon RX 580
- Radeon RX 590
- Radeon RX Vega 56
- Radeon RX Vega 64
- GeForce GTX 980
- GeForce GTX 980 Ti
- GeForce GTX 1060
- GeForce GTX 1070
- GeForce GTX 1070 Ti
- GeForce GTX 1080
- GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
- GeForce GTX 1650
- GeForce GTX 1660
- GeForce GTX 1660 Ti
- GeForce RTX 2060
- GeForce RTX 2070
- GeForce RTX 2080
- GeForce RTX 2080 Ti
- GeForce TITAN RTX

Sadly the Radeon VII still is having issues under Linux with the latest drivers, but I'm beginning to think my particular VII graphics card may have become defective. Both the AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards were rendering correctly, but in the case of the Radeon performance it seems to have some issue capping out at 60 FPS. Vsync was obviously disabled during testing, both Mesa 19.0 and 19.1-devel were tried to rule out any recent Mesa regressions, this wasn't an Adaptive-Sync/FreeSync display so those new Linux code-paths shouldn't be used, and the GeForce graphics cards in the same configuration didn't hit any issues, but the Radeon performance ended up being capped at 60 FPS. Fortunately, at 4K the Radeon data is interesting and thus included in this article.

At 1080p, 1440p, and 4K the Strange Brigade game was tested on Steam Play with a variety of visual settings. Those interested can find this test profile now on OpenBenchmarking.org and available to Phoronix Test Suite users.