22-Way Comparison Of NVIDIA & AMD Graphics Cards On SteamOS For Steam Linux Gaming

First up is BioShock Infinite, which just came to Linux earlier this year. This game under Linux uses the controversial eON technology from Virtual Programming to ease their porting job from Windows to Linux.

In part due to eON, the BioShock Infinite port at 1080p becomes CPU-bound just shy of 130 FPS for the newer and higher-end NVIDIA graphics cards tested... However, the AMD Catalyst (15.9) results become bottlenecked much lower at around 70 FPS. This has sadly been a common occurrence for AMD with their driver becoming bottlenecked at much lower frame-rates than the NVIDIA Linux driver. It's sad when a GeForce GTX 460 Fermi on the NVIDIA Linux driver can outperform the Radeon R9 Fury graphics card... But that really describes the Catalyst Linux driver situation right now. On the NVIDIA side, the GTX 750 and newer should be able to fluidly run BioShock Infinite on SteamOS/Linux.

Here's a look at the results when factoring in the current prices of the graphics cards against their SteamOS performance, which is made easy via the Phoronix Test Suite. To not a whole lot of surprise, the GeForce GTX 750 series delivered the best performance-per-cost ratio while being able to run the game at 88~98 FPS. Following these original Maxwell GPUs was then the rest of the newer Maxwell cards. In last place was obviously the $564 Radeon R9 Fury graphics card.

And onto the system power consumption during this game...

In looking at the graphics card with the best performance-per-Watt, the GeForce GTX 950 and GTX 960 lead.

There's not much to add to these GPU temperature results given that the NVIDIA/AMD cards used are a mix of reference and retail cards from a mixed of AIBs with different cooling solutions.