Quoting: SamsaiAlso, the Gallium3D drivers like Nouveu, R600 and RadeonSI also have additional features that don't exist even in the advanced Nvidia driver of today. With the Gallium drivers you have access to GalliumHUD which is essentially an overlay you can fire up with 3D applications that allows you to monitor CPU usage, memory, framerate and all kinds of other things. The second thing is a quite big one and you might have heard about it. I'm talking about Gallium-Nine.

For those of you who haven't heard about Gallium-Nine, it's a Direct3D state-tracker built on top of Gallium3D. What it allows you to do is bypass the Direct3D→OpenGL conversion and thus taking away some of the overhead of running 3D applications and games in Wine. This can have huge performance impacts. I don't game a whole lot in Wine and the games I play are older games that are most likely never going to get ported to Linux. One of these games is Fallout 3 which I have played quite a bit on the Nvidia driver. It runs pretty well as-is, around 50-60 FPS with occasional drops to 40s. I've tried Gallium-Nine before with Nouveau but I never got much out of it and it even had negative impact in some games and made others unstable. A couple of times the driver even hung when I tried some games with Gallium-Nine. That was not the case with RadeonSI though.


As you can see, RadeonSI with Gallium-Nine completely blew the competition out of the water. Even the mighty Nvidia blob was shadowed by the RadeonSI performance. Just in case you are questioning the validity of the results, I ran the same game version on the same Wine version with the game running at 1080p Ultra without Vsync. The test was conducted by loading up a save of the character looking into the desolate wastes of Washington DC.

I find this particularly interesting as I do own a small amount of games on Steam that are only for Windows and that I have yet to touch. That, plus there are some games that I do not yet own and that will likely never get ported but that I do want to play. Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City, for example. If Feral doesn't get around to porting them in the next few years, I'll buy them dirt cheap off Steam instead of at full price from Feral's store. Other games I am interested in are The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Dark Souls, Dark Souls II, and possibly a few more. All this will have to wait until I get an AMD graphics card, however, and I won't be getting one just to game using Wine.

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Thank you so much for doing these benchmarks, Samsai. They are very much appreciated and I hope to see more in the future.

What I gathered from these benchmarks is that Nvidia still reigns supreme when it comes to playing games native to Linux, that AMD's open source driver is beating its proprietary counterpart here and there whilst being far more stable as a whole, and that AMD reigns supreme for playing games on Linux via Wine.

AMD has two advantages over Nvidia, namely its open source driver and playing games on Linux using Wine, but Nvidia still has the top advantage because playing games on Linux that are native is the most important factor to consider.

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These benchmarks are very much appreciated, liamdawe and Samsai! Please continue to provide more. In addition, have you thought about going back and testing older but still graphically intensive releases? Metro 2033 Redux and Metro: Last Light Redux, for instance?

Quoting: liamdaweSamsai has ordered an AMD R7 370 4GB, and I will also be looking to get one soon. That way we can cover more ground for you, and our benchmarks will be more interesting.

This has me quite excited as that means that Samsai and liamdawe can test the open source driver versus the closed source driver as well! I can't wait!

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I completely and utterly forgot about this game. When I read that it was still coming to Linux, I asked myself when it was ever announced for Linux in the first place. It has been ages since the last piece of news!

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I am especially impressed that these guys are using OpenGL from the start, wasting no time with DirectX just to support one operating system when OpenGL supports all three major operating systems. Smart.

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Quoting: silverphilBtw. i think the decision to let VP do a Linux port is for Codemasters to test how linux sales go in a safe way (for them, since VP ports cost less)

Is that a fact? Doesn't VP demand a lump sum upfront whereas Feral and Aspyr get a percentage of Linux sales, essentially meaning that developers and publishers don't have to pay for a Linux port and the risk lies entirely with Feral and Aspyr?

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I am not fussed as the game did not make it onto my wishlist. I cannot keep up with all these games anyway, despite having a lot of free time at the moment.

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Quoting: fleskMe too. I envy Mac users their selection of LEGO games. Would buy most of those games full price if they were made available for Linux.

I don't care about LEGO games, but I truly wish Feral and Aspyr would bring their Mac OS games to Linux as well. A good deal of the work has been done already by bringing them to Mac OS, right?

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: FutureSutureSega is already the best Japanese company when it comes to bringing games to Linux.

Which games? I wasn't aware they have ported any of their own games to Linux, as in the Sonic series. I thought Sega have only been publishers so far.

Sega has brought us Football Manager, Empre: Total War, and The Cave. Total War: Rome II, Total War: Attila, and Total War: Warhammer have been confirmed for Linux as well.

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Quoting: GuestI really hope this pushes Sega to realize they should be porting their games to Linux.

Sega is already the best Japanese company when it comes to bringing games to Linux. All those games brought to or promised for Linux by Sega have been Western games, however. I still hope that Bandai Namco is watching and decides to bring over Dark Souls, Dark Souls II, Tales of Symphonia, and Tales of Zestiria.

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