Civilization: Beyond Earth Linux GPU/Driver Benchmarks

Thursday marked the Linux release of Civilization: Beyond Earth. While benchmarking games on Steam is less than ideal, I've managed to get CivBE worked into shape so that it can be used for automated Linux performance testing.

As of this morning, via OpenBenchmarking.org is now a Civilization: Beyond Earth test profile for Linux gamers and enthusiasts. This allows you to run phoronix-test-suite benchmark civbe to run automated performance tests of Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth in a fully automated manner assuming you have Steam setup and have bought the game. This test profile though does require using the latest Phoronix-Test-Suite on GitHub due to some additions in the result parser for benefiting from CivBE's raw CSV frame-time dump format. Those changes will be in Phoronix Test Suite 5.4.1.

For those exploring the CivBE test profile contents, there's still the usual environment variable hacks needed to get CivBE running right from the console. the GraphicsSetting.ini also needs to be overwritten each time for lack of adequate CLI options from the Civilization Engine. There also appears to be some issue with the Linux build in supporting resolution changes via the configuration file.

Running Civilization: Beyond Earth with the Phoronix Test Suite will then yield:
The FPS information.
And the frame time graph. (The initial result example is this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.)

With now having the automated testing capabilities in place for the Linux build of Civilization: Beyond Earth, next week I should have out a large Linux GPU/driver comparison for this popular game.