Metro Redux Linux GPU/Driver Tests Are Coming

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Gaming on 12 December 2014 at 03:02 PM EST. 9 Comments
LINUX GAMING
Metro 2033 Redux and Metro Last Light Redux launched for Linux yesterday at long last. The Metro Redux titles utilize OpenGL 4.x on Linux and I'm pleased to say they're in (mostly) good shape for automated benchmarking so that we'll be able to run some Phoronix Test Suite sanctioned performance tests of the Metro Redux games on Linux with varying GPUs and drivers.


The original Metro Last Light title on Windows shipped with a benchmark mode but it wasn't ported over in the original Metro Last Light Linux port. Fortunately, with the redux versions of these games on Linux, the benchmark mode did make it. There's a new -benchmark, option that's supported when launching the game, a -bench_runs option as extra credit (though PTS already takes care of handling multiple runs internally), and a -close_on_finish switch for allowing the Metro Redux games to automatically exit once the benchmark fly-by test is complete!


There's just one problem left... By default when the testing is done the frame-rate information is just displayed on the screen and not dumped to the standard output or to any log file. The Metro binary has a -output_file switch for this purpose as noted by the game's benchmark.sh script, but sadly the output file switch doesn't seem to work. Thus for now everything can be automated but we can't read the results until the Linux port is updated to either properly support the output_file switch it claims to support or we receive other information from the game developers for being able to dump the FPS information.


At least though this is terrific to see a modern GL4-based Linux game on Steam supporting the automated start-up of a fly-by/demo, the automated exiting upon completion, and (hopefully soon) the performance information dumping. I've opened up this Steam Community thread about the issue so hopefully it will be resolved soon so we can move on to running Linux graphics card and driver benchmarks with Metro 2033 Redux and Metro Last Light Redux! For now at least I might put out a brief article shortly what GPUs/drivers can at least start-up with this game.

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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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