17-Way Linux Graphics Card Comparison With Civilization Beyond Earth

The graphics cards used in this comparison were limited to the modern AMD and NVIDIA GPUs I had available for testing and were the:

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 768MB (675/1804MHz)
Zotac NVIDIA GeForce GT 610 1024MB (810/532MHz)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 2048MB (1006/3004MHz)
eVGA NVIDIA GeForce GT 740 1024MB (1084/2500MHz)
eVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 1024MB (1019/2505MHz)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2048MB (1019/2700MHz)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 2048MB (980/3004MHz)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti 3072MB (875/3500MHz)
eVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4096MB (1163/3505MHz)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 4096MB (1126/3505MHz)
Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 6870 1024MB (900/1050MHz)
Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 6950 2048MB (800/1250MHz)
ASUS AMD Radeon HD 7850 1024MB (860/1200MHz)
XFX AMD Radeon HD 7950 3072MB (900/1375MHz)
AMD Radeon R9 270X 2048MB (1100/1400MHz)
AMD Radeon R9 285 2048MB (918/1375MHz)
AMD Radeon R9 290 4096MB (947/1250MHz)

The Civilization: Beyond Earth benchmarking was done with the Phoronix Test Suite automated testing software. Beyond looking at the frame-rates, on the following pages are also the frame latency information and the PTS system sensor monitoring of the GPU core temperature, AC system power consumption, and calculated performance-per-Watt metrics. All of this was automated by the Phoronix Test Suite when setting the PERFORMANCE_PER_WATT=1 MONITOR=sys.power,gpu.temp environment variables while simply running phoronix-test-suite benchmark civbe.

On the following pages are our initial benchmark results of Sid Meier's Civilization Beyond Earth on Ubuntu 14.10 Linux. On the AMD side the Catalyst 14.12 Omega driver was used (fglrx 14.50.2 / OpenGL 4.4.13283) and on the GeForce side was the NVIDIA 346.22, both of which are the latest publicly available drivers at the time of testing.