Revisiting Linux GPUs: Playing the Driver Game

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, based on the original Quake3 engine, has served as our core benchmark for OpenGL games on Linux. The last time that we revisited this benchmark, we saw some very extreme scaling scenarios with regard to the ATI versus NVIDIA benchmarks. If price alone should dictate how video cards scale alone, then we would expect the Radeon 9800 Pro to retail for considerably less than the GeForceFX 5700 Ultra.

Even though ATI was able to pull off some single digit FPS gains, NVIDIA's lead is already so far ahead that NVIDIA's single-digit FPS gains put ATI just about back where they started. We were particularly lucky with Wolfenstein because there has been no version change since the last GPU benchmark. Below, you can see the first graph from two months ago that demonstrated NVIDIA versus ATI performance in the radar timedemo. Once again, feel free to download the CSV file here.



The next graph is the same timedemo using the 1.0-6629 NVIDIA drivers and the 3.14.6 ATI drivers.

Although most of the changes are minute, there are definite performance increases across the board for both cards. Near second 43, the "fire scene" that hurt performance so badly in the first GPU roundup seems less prevalent this time around. Overlays of screen captures from today's benchmark runs revealed no differences in anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering. It would appear as though the performance gains that we noticed today are not coming from optimizations - both screenshots are identical down to the individual pixel.

NVIDIA GeForceFX 5700 Ultra 43rd Second

1.0-6111 (Click to Enlarge)