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

Final Thoughts

There are so many more real world examples than just the few benchmarks that we looked at today. We did not cover many Image Quality (IQ) scenarios in this analysis either - particularly since the ATI driver has very limited (non-existent) support with Anisotropic Filtering while our NVIDIA cards just ignored any Anisotropic Filtering commands.

You can view our CSV with the performance of each video card from the roundup here.

When we started this review, we had no premonitions on the outcome of some of our video cards. It's true that installing NVIDIA drivers on Linux is almost as painless as installing the drivers on Windows; when the SuSE Yast Online Updates are up to date, installing via the online update is actually easier than Windows. ATI's drivers, on the other hand, gave us several problems - so much so that we actually ended up re-doing the analysis a few times with different kernels/motherboards just to get it right. The lack of 64-bit ATI drivers also prevented us from doing a fair 64-bit binary comparison of our game lineup.

Although we tested only two games under Wine, and one did not work, we cannot call our Wine testing very exhaustive. With more time and energy, we will devote a separate article to analyzing some games just under Wine/Cedega to see how they perform. Jedi Knight performed exceptionally; we were very impressed for a change with how easily something actually worked under Linux. We are interested in Wine's development, but we also anticipate dilemmas that it will soon face against AMD and Intel's virtualization projects. If Intel and AMD successfully create multi-core processors that allow each core to run its own operating system - and they will, given enough time - there may be a large backlash in the Linux gaming community. Users could simply run a copy of Windows (for games) and a copy of Linux (for work) at the same time without rebooting. That is, if they are OK with the price of Windows when such technologies become available. Perhaps more developers will follow in the footsteps of id and Epic, and Linux binaries will become commonplace before multi-OS virtualization squeezes the developers out.

It is important to consider that we were not particularly comparing ATI to NVIDIA in this analysis. Although this analysis did draw some pretty strong lines as to where each card stand, we were more interested in how each game performed compared to their Windows counterparts. We drew a lot of conclusions from one of our more recent video card analyses from July. Surprisingly, most of our NVIDIA video cards scaled very similarly. Wine games like Jedi Knight took a 10% to 15% hit in performance compared to the Windows tests that we did just a few weeks ago. Other games like Unreal Tournament 2004 actually showed mild signs of an increase in frame rate on the NVIDIA graphics cards. Wolfenstein: ET generally performed with similar average FPS to our video cards from 2003. However, keep in mind that the drivers used then were almost a year old.

Medal of Honor: AA and Racer do not have direct Windows benchmarks, but they helped determine a great deal about the scalability of our video cards under Linux. We were happy to see that the ATI cards were capable of keeping pace, even though there were issues with other games. Almost all of ATI's short comings on Linux came from the driver set; lack of Anisotropic Filtering, difficult configuration and few accelerated games were all issues. On the other hand, even though NVIDIA claims support for Anisotropic Filtering, we could not find an instance of it working in our testing.

High performance gaming on Linux certainly isn't for everyone. We spent weeks preparing for this analysis and we still ran into problems that we could not correct. So many times, we came to a solution for a problem only to find our Linux distribution had some files in a slightly different place or our file dependency tree was completely broken. These are the things that scare away people from Linux. Although customizing our own system, contravening the Microsoft "monopoly" and roughing-it-on-our-own were refreshing and challenging, this editor immediately fired up the Tribes: Vengence demo on Windows after the Linux testing and editing were complete. Total time to install and configure: 5 minutes, 40 seconds; now that was refreshing.

During publication of this review, we received some information from ATI about some upcoming Linux announcements which they are working on. We will keep you informed of the details as we hear them.