14-Way NVIDIA GPU Comparison With Civilization VI On Linux
Aspyr Media today released their native Linux port of Civilization VI. Here are benchmarks of fourteen different NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards from Kepler to Pascal for seeing how well this game performs. Benchmarks with (not officially supported) RadeonSI and Intel Mesa graphics will be coming up next.
Civilization VI is a heavy game and early indications are the performance of this port using OpenGL (sorry, no Vulkan ports from Aspyr Media yet) is noticeably lower than the game running on Windows with Direct3D. Making matters more complex, the integrated benchmark mode for Civilization VI is particularly heavy. So with these Civ VI results, they are closer to worst-case scenarios if you are estimating your gameplay experiences off these results.
The Civilization VI Linux port is very taxing upon the CPU as you'll see from the data about to be presented. After testing a few cards, I had even re-started the tests after deciding to enable MSI's OC Genie on this board and swapping in some DDR4-3200 memory rather than DDR4-2400. All of these graphics cards were tested on the new Intel Core i7 7700K Kabylake system.
The tested NVIDIA cards include:
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 2048MB
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2048MB
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 2048MB
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti 3072MB
eVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950 2048MB
eVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 2048MB
eVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4096MB
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 4096MB
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6144MB
Zotac NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 2048MB
eVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4096MB
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB 6144MB
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 8192MB
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 8192MB
The Civilization VI test profile was added today to OpenBenchmarking.org. There is a choice of resolutions and then for the quality settings is basically the choice of the lowest or highest quality visuals. There is no frame-rate capping or vsync enabled. Using this test profile will overwrite your stock Civilization VI Linux configuration due to limitations with the game's built-in benchmarking mode, but aside from that, it still suits our Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking requirements.