Are The Open-Source Graphics Drivers Good Enough For Steam Linux Gaming?

First up was the eON-ported BioShock Infinite. With the GeForce graphics cards using the open-source Nouveau driver, the performance was very slow due to only being partially re-clocked (0a) compared to the NVIDIA proprietary driver that can make full use of the hardware at its rated frequencies... When it came to the AMD testing, only the Radeon R9 290 successfully ran BioShock Infinite. However, the performance of the R9 290 was more than halved compared to the Catalyst 15.9 driver. The situation may improve though with the newer Mesa code coming out seeing as ARB_copy_image was just properly implemented, etc.

With DiRT Showdown, the Radeon R9 290 was the only graphics card able to complete the testing due to the factors mentioned on the first page. Here, however, the R9 290 performed rather well though the Catalyst driver was about 13% faster.

The Nouveau driver couldn't successfully run the Metro Redux games. Here is a look at the HD 7950, R9 290, and R9 Fury. While the R9 Fury ran, the R9 285 would lock-up during this game. The R9 Fury was the slowest of the graphics cards tested due to its complete lack of re-clocking right now while the HD 7950 and R9 290 were also very slow.