Xonotic 0.8 Performance With The Open-Source AMD/NVIDIA Gallium3D Drivers

With Xonotic 0.8.0 finally having been released after one and a half years in development, here's some open-source Mesa/Gallium3D graphics benchmarks on many different graphics cards for this high-profile open-source first person shooter game.

As Xonotic has advanced a lot between Xonotic 0.7 and Xonotic 0.8, this weekend I ran some tests on several different AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards using the newest open-source driver code. The driver stack consisted of the Linux 3.19 Git kernel, Mesa 10.5-devel + LLVM 3.6 SVN via the Padoka PPA, xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.11, and xf86-video-ati 7.5.99 Git. Ubuntu 14.10 was the host system.

The group of graphics cards tested for this article included:

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 768MB (50/135MHz)
eVGA NVIDIA GeForce GT 520 1024MB (270/405MHz)
eVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti 1024MB (405/324MHz)
MSI NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 1024MB (1084/5000MHz)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 2048MB (862/1620MHz)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 2048MB (967/1620MHz)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti 3072MB (1202/1620MHz)
HIS AMD Radeon HD 6450 1024MB
Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 6870 1024MB
Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 6950 2048MB
ASUS AMD Radeon HD 7850 1024MB
XFX AMD Radeon HD 7950 3072MB
Gigabyte AMD Radeon R9 270X 2048MB
XFX AMD Radeon R9 290 4096MB

As shown with the auto-generated Phoronix Test Suite system table, the NVIDIA GPUs were re-clocked to the maximum supported frequencies where supported. Fermi re-clocking doesn't yet work in the mainline driver and the Kepler support is still limited. Aside from the GTX 650 that could achieve its 0f (highest) performance state, the other Kepler GPUs could only top out at the 0a performance state. Of course, newer GPUs like the Radeon R9 285 and GeForce GTX 970/980 couldn't be tested yet for lack of open-source support.

On the next page are some basic Xonotic 0.8 game benchmarks for those curious. With the Phoronix Test Suite you can check your system's own performance by running phoronix-test-suite benchmark xonotic or phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1501188-DE-XONOTIC0819 to compare your system's own performance side-by-side to the results about to be shown.