How Well Modern Linux Games Scale To Multiple CPU Cores

DiRT Rally was just released this past week by Feral Interactive. The game wouldn't even run when just one core was exposed but there was an error message box about an unsupported CPU. DiRT Rally's performance scaled up to four CPU cores, but beyond that, the performance had regressed a bit with 5+ cores, perhaps due to the work bouncing around between cores.

Dota 2 with its OpenGL renderer topped out at about five CPU cores.

Dota 2 with the Vulkan renderer refused to run with just one CPU core. The Vulkan performance had also scaled up to about five CPU cores too. The performance between OpenGL and Vulkan with the GeForce GTX TITAN X on the NVIDIA driver is quite close in this game. Hyper Threading had yielded a minor drop in performance.

While Metro Last Light Redux is an older Linux game, it actually scales rather well and saw its performance continuing to improve up to six CPU cores while Hyper Threading had yielded a minor drop in the frame-rate.