22-Way AMD+NVIDIA Graphics Card Tests With Metro Redux On Steam For Linux
First up are the results from Metro 2033 Redux in our initial Linux testing of this game that's been out just for a month on Steam for Linux / SteamOS.
As mentioned in the introduction, the AMD Catalyst 14.12 driver has a definite problem with the Metro Redux games... The Radeon HD 6000 series on the same driver was faster than any of the AMD GCN GPUs using this latest public proprietary driver. This happened across the board with all of the AMD GPUs tested that the performance was abysmal while Catalyst 14.12 for Linux was properly loaded. In asking on Twitter and elsewhere if other AMD Linux users had troubles with Metro, it seemed no one had any good experiences to report but only negative. Given the titles have just been out on Linux for about one month, hopefully AMD's first Catalyst 15.xx driver will correct the severe performance challenges. For now the results in this article are thus really just interesting for the NVIDIA Linux numbers.
The NVIDIA numbers don't come as a huge surprise and with the latest 346.22 driver the performance was in line with expectations. The GeForce GTX 970/980 Maxwell GPUs shined well as did the GeForce GTX 780 Ti Kepler. These high-end NVIDIA GPUs were averaging around 80 FPS at 2560 x 1600 with the default settings of the game, which as explained earlier in the article appear (sadly) to not be capable of being forced when running the Metro benchmark mode on Linux. The GeForce GTX 750 Ti came up just shy of being able to deliver a sixty FPS average while anything faster than that mid-range NVIDIA GPU should be playable on Linux for this game.
For those curious about the frame latencies for the 22 graphics cards tested, here's the Phoronix Test Suite results using libframetime and presenting them in a modified box plot form for the massive data set. Any higher-end NVIDIA GPU on Linux should be the best match for playing Metro Redux. Hopefully AMD's Catalyst Linux driver will be corrected soon.