Benchmarking Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor On Linux

Before getting to the benchmark results, first here's the situation if you're an AMD Catalyst driver. While the Catalyst driver exposes OpenGL 4.5 (and Shadow of Mordor only needs OpenGL 4.3), bugs in the driver prevent the game from running well...

When starting up the game with AMD Catalyst present, you're first presented with a message box warning users about problematic Catalyst support for this game. They recommend using Catalyst 15.7 or newer for best support. I was using Catalyst 15.7 for all of my AMD Radeon tests with this being the latest Linux graphics driver.

At first I was using a Radeon R9 Fury for the AMD tests. As you can see, even the in-game menu isn't rendered correctly on Catalyst 15.7 with the R9 Fury.

This also carried through into the benchmark mode with the rendering issues.

However, when switching to the Radeon R9 290, there wasn't the pixelation issues on Catalyst, so that rendering snafu might be something R9 Fury / certain GPU specific.

With the proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver there were no rendering issues.