RadeonSI Performance For Civilization VI On Linux With Mesa 17.1 + 4.10 Kernel

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Gaming on 10 February 2017 at 08:12 AM EST. Page 1 of 5. 43 Comments.

Since yesterday's release of Civilization VI for Linux, ported by Aspyr Media, we have published a 14-way NVIDIA GPU comparison with this newest high-profile Linux game release. This morning I also shared some Intel Kabylake game figures for Civilization 6 while now the focus is on RadeonSI.

For launch-day Aspyr Media only listed NVIDIA graphics as supported via the proprietary Linux driver. However, we heard that AMD Mesa / RadeonSI should work. After finding that Intel Kabylake on Mesa 17.1-dev was rendering correctly for this latest Civilization game, it was less of a surprise to me to find that AMDGPU+RadeonSI was indeed working.

With my tests of different Radeon graphics cards, using Ubuntu 16.10 and then upgrading to Mesa 17.1-dev Git and the Linux 4.10 Git, the Civilization VI benchmark mode was working fine... At least in terms of rendering correctly, performance is a different story.

NVIDIA + RadeonSI Civ Vi Linux Benchmarks

I pulled out six AMD Radeon GCN graphics cards for benchmarking against the NVIDIA cards. The AMD hardware for testing was the Radeon R9 270X, R9 285, R7 370, RX 460, RX 480, and R9 Fury. The fourteen different NVIDIA cards from Kepler to Pascal remained there for comparison data points. All of these Civilization VI Linux benchmarks were carried out in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.


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