The NVIDIA GPUs Delivering The Best Performance Per Watt & Per Dollar For Linux Gamers

Well, it was a heck of a lot of graphs to go through. You can find even more data via the OpenBenchmarking.org result files for the 1080p run and 4K results. Here's the look at the meta-performance for the best power efficiency and value for all of the Linux games tested at 1080p and 4K. First up are the 1080p results.

The performance-per-Watt efficiency at 1080p ended up being largely comparable against the majority of NVIDIA Maxwell GPUs tested. (Pardon the precision issue, will be fixed in a Phoronix Test Suite Git update shortly.)

To not much surprise, the GeForce GTX 750 Ti ended up delivering the best performance-per-dollar at 1080p, albeit couldn't quite run all of the games smoothly while it was followed by the GTX 950 and GTX 960.'

For 4K performance-per-Watt, the GTX 970 and GTX 980 were delivering the best results and the power efficiency was more pronounced than in the 1080p data.

For the 4K testing, the GeForce GTX 960 was delivering the best performance-per-dollar. For a majority of the tests, the GTX 960~970 were the minimum playable graphics cards for 3840 x 2160 gaming on Linux with the proprietary NVIDIA driver.

The results of these extra metrics largely jive with my recommendation that if you're a Linux gamer and not minding to use the proprietary graphics drivers, the GeForce GTX 960 (~$199) and GeForce GTX 970 ($329) represent nice spots for delivering good performance and value, depending upon your budget. These graphics cards can easily run modern Linux games at 1080p and most of them just fine at 4K as well, but any serious 4K Linux gamer would find a more pleasant experience moving forward with a higher-end graphics card (GTX 970 or better). You can see the latest deals on NVIDIA graphics cards and current pricing via our Amazon.com affiliate link that goes to support our Linux hardware testing work when making online purchases. If you found this article insightful or helpful to you, also consider supporting the work by subscribing to Phoronix Premium or making a PayPal tip.

Coming up next will be a similar comparison with my AMD graphics cards followed by a possible open-source value/efficiency comparison. If you have any feedback on how to make the performance-per-dollar/Watt data more useful, feel free to comment in the forums or even by sending in patches to the Phoronix Test Suite on GitHub.