Linux 3D AGP GPU Roundup: More Cutting Edge Penguin Performance

Introduction

We recently took a look at several performance CPUs last week - and we were incredibly impressed by the amount of interest it spawned. Our little Linux section has been making waves left and right and we are quickly establishing ourselves as the premier Linux hardware journal. We have been working very diligently on a GPU roundup to top all GPU roundups in the Linux world. It has taken us a little over 3 weeks from start to finish, but we think that the final product is well worth it.

We get dozens of emails a day from readers asking which video card is right for them, particularly if they are going to give Linux a shot. It may be due to the circles that we run in, but the sheer interest for Linux among our peers seems to have peaked 100-fold what it was last year. Simple, clean distros like SuSE, Fedora Core and Mandrake have done wonders to the Windows migration crowd - and then there is the whole Gentoo sensation as well. Linux is definitely growing, but does it really have a competitive edge in any gaming or graphics intensive application?

The focus of this analysis is not to fire up glxgears, and see which program runs it faster. Instead, we want to look at some common graphics intensive applications for Linux and determine how well they run, particularly in relation to their Windows counterparts. We are interested in more than just the benchmark results - getting there is half the fun, and coincidentally, half the weighting for a purchase decision for many of us. Invariably, we will draw some conclusions from one GPU family to another out of the eleven cards that we have chosen to compare today.

When it comes to our quantitative data, we aren't just looking at average frames per second and declaring a winner. We have spent weeks working on a graphics benchmark utility specifically designed for AnandTech, which we are open sourcing and releasing to the world today as well.