20-Way AMD / NVIDIA Linux Gaming Benchmarks For The 2018 Holidays

With the Vulkan-powered F1 2017 racing game, which is the newest of this driving game series on Linux while F1 2018 is on Steam Play, the RADV Radeon performance continues hitting expectations with the RX 580 coming just in front of the GTX 1060 and the RX Vega 64 frames ahead of the GTX 1070. The Radeon R9 290 Hawaii card is even playable for this game with RADV when opting to use the AMDGPU DRM driver over the default Radeon code.

Batman: Arkham Origins is currently the newest game of the series that plays well under Steam Play (Proton / DXVK) with there being no native Linux port at this time. Here at 1440p the RX 580 comes out ahead of the GTX 1060 while the RX Vega cards are coming up shy of the GTX 1070 by several frames. Additionally, the R9 Fury performance is in line with the RX Vega 64... While the Vega performance on RADV has matured a lot this year, there still are cases like this where the Vega performance on this open-source Vulkan driver is coming up short of expectations.

On a performance-per-Watt basis, the current Radeon hardware is coming in line with the GTX 900 Maxwell series.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided with OpenGL runs great on the Radeon side where the RX 580 is frames ahead of the GTX 1060 and where even the RX Vega 56 competes with the GTX 1070 and the RX Vega 64 hitting the GTX 1080. RadeonSI OpenGL has more Vega optimizations than RADV Vulkan in part because AMD contributes to that GL driver while RADV is an independent/community effort for Vulkan with AMD preferring to focus on their AMDVLK driver.

Even with the strong RadeonSI OpenGL performance in Deux Ex: Mankind Divided, Vega and Polaris are still only offering the power efficiency comparable to the GTX 900 Maxwell series.