Automated Benchmarking With DiRT Showdown On Linux

There are many graphics card tests imminent for DiRT Showdown, the latest high profile game ported to Linux. These AMD and NVIDIA graphics card results should be particularly interesting considering DiRT Showdown is a port to Linux using Virtual Programm's controversial eON layer.

DiRT Showdown was released for Linux earlier today as the newest racing game for Tux. With the Windows version of the game having a benchmark mode and there even being a "-benchmark" shortcut for running it, I decided to buy this $15 Linux game and check it out... Besides there being the benchmark mode available through the in-game menu, the -benchmark mode does work on Linux when passing it to the dirt launcher. This switch will start the game in its benchmark mode, dump the results to an XML file, and exit gracefully; just how I like it!

The only sad part is that there doesn't appear to be any command-line switches for setting the resolution and graphics/visual preset options. So for coming up with a Phoronix Test Suite test profile around DiRT Showdown, I had to hack up the game's XML profiles used by eON. For making this basic benchmarking test, I just did the preset levels of low, high, and ultra quality settings and exposed the resolutions. With the dumped XML result data from the game, there's also the minimum FPS data too that's read by the Phoronix Test Suite.

This new dirt-showdown test profile appears to be working fine and I've started running my graphics card comparisons with different AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce GPUs on the latest binary blobs. The hacked up test profile can be found via this OpenBenchmarking.org URL while here's the test profile page.

Being worked on right now will be about a dozen AMD/NVIDIA graphics card comparison with testing at 1080p and 4K. The tests are still ongoing and too early to say how the NVIDIA vs. AMD Linux performance is comparing for this eON-powered port. As usual, if you appreciate this work and this new Steam game test profile for benchmarking via the Phoronix Test Suite, please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium or making a PayPal tip.