Linux Benchmarks

Ubuntu's latest 64-bit release —8.04— powered our test machine for the Linux portion of this review. It offered an ease of setup, particularly with the Radeon drivers. Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, version 8.4 of the Catalyst drivers had yet to make it in Ubuntu's repositories. Therefor, a manual install was necessary, but simple.

glxgears, a controversial benchmark?

When people complain of poor glxgears performance, it may or may not give a good idea of how your graphics card will perform in games. glxgears may very well report several thousand frames per second, and yet your gaming performance will be horrendous. This typically falls under the category of Xorg configuration, but it could be any number of things. Thankfully, we didn't run in to this issue.

As I suspected, the HD3870 Toxic was beaten by the 8800GTX. It's been common knowledge that the nVidia driver performs much better in Linux than ATI's. Many improvements have been made to the ATI driver since AMD bought ATI, but there is still much performance left to be desired.

Unreal Tournament 2004

I installed the 64-bit edition of Unreal Tournament 2004, much like in Windows. I applied the previously mentioned command line options to the Linux binary through a simple shell script, then ran the benchmark.

Much like glxgears, the HD3870 Toxic was overtaken by the 8800GTX, but only slightly. Neither card performed quite where it's Windows counterpart did, but there's more than enough performance for a very smooth game experience.