12-Way NVIDIA GeForce Comparison For F1 2015 On Linux

While the F1 2015 Formula One racing game was released for Windows last year, only yesterday was the Linux port released by Feral Interactive. Given the high requirements for F1 2015 on Linux with this OpenGL port, I decided to test this racing game on a range of NVIDIA graphics cards under Ubuntu Linux. Yep, only NVIDIA tests this round as the game doesn't work yet with the AMD Linux drivers.

Feral Interactive recommends a GeForce GTX 970 or better for playing F1 2015 on Linux while the listed minimum system requirement is a GeForce GT 640. Under Windows, the game lists the minimum supported GPUs as a AMD HD 5770 or higher / Intel 4th Gen Iris / GeForce GTS450 or higher. Their recommended graphics on Windows is a Radeon R9 290, 5th Gen Intel Iris Pro, or GeForce GTX 970. Given this Linux port is much more taxing on the system and doesn't even work with the Intel or AMD Linux drivers, for this comparison I tested a variety of Kepler and Maxwell graphics cards.

The twelve graphics cards I tested for this new Linux game release was the GeForce GTX 650, GTX 680, GTX 750, GTX 750 Ti, GTX 760, GTX 780 Ti, GTX 950, GTX 960, GTX 970, GTX 980, GTX 980 Ti, and GTX TITAN X. The complete Maxwell line-up and most Kepler cards. My GTX 1080 Pascal is arriving any time now, so I'll add in some extra data there in its review.

The NVIDIA 367.18 Beta Linux driver was running on this Ubuntu 16.04 x86_64 box during testing.

The F1 2015 Linux game has a test profile on OpenBenchmarking.org and thus can be tested in a fully-automated and repeatable manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. On the following pages are these preliminary results for the NVIDIA GTX line-up of F1 2015 on Ubuntu 16.04.