Tomb Raider Benchmarks On Linux With NVIDIA Graphics

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Gaming on 27 April 2016 at 04:37 PM EDT. Page 1 of 3. 59 Comments.

With Feral Interactive releasing Tomb Raider for Linux, three years after the premiere of the Windows port, many have been wondering about the Linux performance particularly with regards to the graphics driver situation. Here are our initial benchmarks of Feral's port of Tomb Raider on Ubuntu Linux with using NVIDIA graphics. More tests to follow.

For the initial benchmarks I've been able to carry out in the hours since Tomb Raider was made available to Linux/SteamOS gamers are testing newer NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS using the proprietary NVIDIA graphics driver. Open-source AMD (and potentially Nouveau) tests are still being worked on.

These benchmarks were done with the game's built-in benchmarking scene. While the Tomb Raider 2013 release on Windows had command-line-capable benchmarking options (confirmation via the PC Gaming Wiki), sadly, it seems these CLI switches don't work with Feral's port... I poked through the Tomb Raider Linux binary and it still contains references about -benchmark and -benchmarkini, etc, but sadly it doesn't appear to be properly wired up. I'm still waiting to find out from Feral if this is intentional or an issue they will fix. Hopefully they will be able to fix it then it would allow for nice, repeatable, automated benchmarks with Tomb Raider on Linux from start-to-finish plus the ability to benchmark with a predefined INI configuration/settings file and those options being exposed for all options like TessFS and various pre-set levels would make for some fun testing...

Thus for the testing today I had to manually run the benchmark menu and adjust the settings from the in-game menu. I'll still do that for the open-source driver tests, but if the Tomb Raider Linux benchmark CLI switches aren't fixed in a future build of the game, sadly this will be our last time testing the game for any Linux GPU/driver comparisons due to our strict testing standards for reproducible benchmarking.

Tomb Raider NVIDIA Linux Performance Data

The NVIDIA 364.19 driver was used during the benchmarking process. The graphics cards tested for this comparison were the GeForce GTX 680, GTX 760, GTX 780 Ti, GTX 950, GTX 960, GTX 970, and GTX 980 Ti.


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