Latest AMDGPU-PRO Ubuntu Linux Performance vs. NVIDIA, Including The GTX 1080

Last week when posting my initial NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Linux review the Radeon Linux performance numbers I included were from the latest open-source driver stack, since that's what most Phoronix readers seem interested in as of late given the rapid progress recently of OpenGL 4.x support inside Mesa, the hybrid driver stack also using the AMDGPU kernel driver, etc. But some people expressed curiosity over the AMDGPU-PRO performance relative to NVIDIA particularly with their new GTX 1080 graphics processor. So here is a fresh NVIDIA vs. AMDGPU-PRO graphics card comparison on Linux.

Tested on the NVIDIA side were the GeForce GTX 680, GTX 760, GTX 770, GTX 780 Ti, GTX 950, GTX 960, GTX 970, GTX 980, GTX 980 Ti, GTX TITAN X, and GTX 1080. On the AMD side tested with the AMDGPU-PRO hybrid stack was just the Radeon R9 285, R9 290, and R9 Fury considering my limited selection of red hardware and needing GCN 1.1+, plus needing their higher-end hardware anyways to compete with NVIDIA's modern offerings.

The NVIDIA graphics cards were tested with the 367.18 beta driver while the AMD cards were tested with the AMDGPU-PRO Beta 2 driver / OpenGL 4.5.13439 driver. All of the tests happened on the same Ubuntu 16.04 LTS x86_64 system powered by an Intel Xeon E3 v5 Skylake processor. All of the OpenCL, Vulkan, and OpenGL benchmarks for this article were carried out in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.