NVIDIA RTX 30 Series vs. AMD Radeon Linux Gaming Performance For April 2021

Written by Michael Larabel in Graphics Cards on 30 April 2021 at 11:34 AM EDT. Page 1 of 6. 26 Comments.

With recently receiving the rest of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 "Ampere" line-up we had no access to previously for testing, the past few weeks were busy with testing/re-testing these new graphics cards as well as prior GeForce RTX 20 series hardware and relevant AMD Radeon graphics cards for offering a current look at the 1440p and 4K Linux gaming performance.

Earlier this month were a number of NVIDIA RTX 30 series compute benchmarks with the entire line-up of cards now in our possession for testing. Additionally, following the AMD Radeon Software for Linux driver this month finally introducing Vulkan ray-tracing support, there were also the Radeon RX 6800 vs. GeForce RTX 30 RT benchmarks. On that front though the Radeon Software packaged driver Vulkan ray-tracing support remaining a work-in-progress and not yet playing well with VKD3D-Proton. Additionally, the open-source Radeon Vulkan drivers do not yet support ray-tracing. So while a proprietary driver stack, the NVIDIA Vulkan driver support for the Vulkan RT extensions is in much better standing.


The RTX 3090 is indeed... BIG.

The line-up of graphics cards tested for this round of 1440p and 4K Linux gaming included:

- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti
- NVIDIA GeForce TITAN RTX
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090
- AMD Radeon VII
- AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT
- AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT
- AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT
- AMD Radeon RX 6800
- AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT

Thanks to NVIDIA for providing the RTX 30 graphics cards we previously didn't have access to for Linux benchmarking. Similarly, thanks to AMD for the Radeon graphics cards tested. There isn't any Radeon RX 6900 series tested in today's article for still not having any RX 6900 XT.

All of these benchmarks were carried out on an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X system running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. On the NVIDIA driver side was the NVIDIA 460.67 Linux driver while on the Radeon side was Linux 5.12 Git along with Mesa 21.1-devel from early April built against LLVM 12.0. Due to the time involved with (re)testing all of the graphics cards, there is now the newer NVIDIA 465 driver series and on the Radeon side Linux 5.13 Git plus Mesa 21.2-devel. So next month I'll be working through another comparison with the latest driver stacks at that point. Similarly, NVIDIA is still working on getting me updated vBIOS support for Resizable BAR Linux testing so that will also hopefully pan out for May testing too.

4K Linux Gaming April 2021

Via the Phoronix Test Suite a variety of Linux native as well as Steam Play titles were benchmarked.

The GPU power consumption was also monitored during the benchmarking process.


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