AMD Radeon, NVIDIA GeForce Linux Comparison For July 2013

First up are the results for the OpenArena 0.8.8 game, which isn't too demanding though it is open-source, but at least at 2560 x 1600 on the Samsung 30-inch display it's a bit taxing. Aside from the AMD A10-6800K and GeForce GT 240, all of the GPUs were able to push above a sixty frames-per-second average. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 and AMD Radeon HD 7950 graphics cards obviously pushed the best frame-rates.

Here's another look at things with using the Reaction Quake 3 game, which struggles on the open-source Mesa/Gallium3D drivers but is no rendering issue at all for the closed-source Linux graphics drivers. None of these results should come as a terrible surprise if you've read the individual Linux graphics card reviews previously on Phoronix. The purpose of today's article is to provide a general updated look at the AMD Radeon vs. NVIDIA GeForce graphics performance with the latest Ubuntu Linux software and AMD/NVIDIA proprietary drivers.

When running Valve's Source-based Team Fortress 2 game at 2560 x 1600, the graphics cards to fall short of a 60 FPS average were the A10-6800K, Radeon HD 7850, GeForce GT 220, GeForce GT 240, and GeForce GTX 460. It's interesting to see the HD 7850 and GTX 460 perform so poorly. AMD Catalyst Linux updates are still working out various Source Engine / Team Fortress 2 issues, which may partially explain the odd performance, though out of the GeForce GTX 460 Fermi it's odd that the NVIDIA driver would still be acting up for this title.