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

Next up we're onto one of the most popular Linux games currently: Counter-Strike Global Offensive.

With the Catalyst 15.9 driver that I upgraded to prior to testing, the AMD graphics cards finally run more competitively for this game that's been on Linux for more than one year. In previous driver versions they didn't have an application profile for CS:GO, which led to poor performance. However, even with this improved support on Catalyst 15.9, the AMD performance still is embarrassing. With CS:GO at 1080p, the Radeon R9 Fury on SteamOS performs shy of the GeForce GTX 950... The Radeon HD 6950 and newer graphics cards on Catalyst delivered playable frame-rates, but the NVIDIA performance was much better.

With NVIDIA's performance advantage, the cost ratio still leans heavily in the green team's favor.

For Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, the performance-per-Watt results put the AMD R9 Fury and other GCN GPUs as only competing with the GeForce GTX 750 series.

As the last from CS:GO, the raw system power consumption and thermal data for those interested: