Total War: Attila Performs Miserably On Linux

Shortly after today's release of GRID Autosport for Linux, The Creative Assembly finally released the Linux port of Total War: Attila. With running the GRID Autosport benchmarks on a number of cards, I also tossed in this strategy game for running some initial Linux benchmarks of this game with both AMD and NVIDIA graphics.

The performance of Total War: Attila is a big let down on Linux, but it looks like under Windows this game isn't known for great performance. The Linux experience on both AMD and NVIDIA was bad, but particularly bad on the red side. Beyond that, this is sadly another game that has a built-in benchmark mode but appears inaccessible via command line switches. Thus, this article is the first and last time that Total War: Attila will be tested at Phoronix without being able to properly automate it for accuracy and reproducibility.

The AMD experience was particularly bad as aside from low performance, with select graphics cards like the Radeon R9 Fury on Radeon Software Crimson, the game frequently crashed. Thus the only AMD results that could complete the built-in benchmark were for the Radeon R9 285 and Radeon R9 290. On the NVIDIA side I didn't run into any stability issues, but the performance there was also rather low.

On the NVIDIA side I was using the 358.16 driver release. The cards I tested with Total War: Attila were the GeForce GTX 680, GTX 760, GTX 950, GTX 980 Ti, and GTX TITAN X. The same system as used in the GRID Autosport NVIDIA/AMD Linux benchmarking was used for this Total War testing, so check out that earlier article for more extensive information on this Ubuntu Linux system powered by the Core i7 5960X Haswell-E processor.

Creative Assembly lists this game on SteamOS/Linux as needing a minimum of a GeForce GTX 470 and recommending at least a GeForce GTX 760. They also explicitly state AMD and Intel are unsupported, "AMD graphics cards and Intel IGPU’s are not currently supported on the SteamOS + Linux version of Total War: ATTILA." Under Windows they recommend a Radeon HD 2900XT as minimum or GeForce 8800GT while recommending at least a GeForce GTX 560 Ti or Radeon HD 5870.