OpenGL Performance & Performance-Per-Watt For NVIDIA GPUs From The Past 10 Years
With these 27 graphics cards they were tested on the following Ubuntu 15.10 system:
All of them ran fine with no regressions or driver issues to report! As mentioned in the GeForce 6 testing a few days ago, even that on an older legacy driver was still working too! NVIDIA maintaining their legacy drivers for support on newer Linux kernels and X.Org Servers is great and the same can't be said for the legacy Catalyst driver. Even with last week's open-source AMD tests, many of the older graphics cards that I tried to test were affected by regressions in the modern open-source driver code.
For being able to stress the modern generations of NVIDIA hardware, the OpenGL games/benchmarks were run at 2560 x 1600. Going back to the GeForce 8 hardware, the tested GPUs could mode-set to 2560 x 1600 at least, albeit for many of the GPUs the performance is very slow and unplayable but at least can be used for comparing the evolution of NVIDIA GPU performance. Obviously the hardware back then couldn't even test at 4K so no tests were run there.
When running the benchmarks, the AC system power consumption was measured by a WattsUp Pro power meter. The Phoronix Test Suite was monitoring the performance in real-time and that was also used for automatically calculating the performance per Watt (just as easy as setting the MONITOR=sys.power PERFORMANCE_PER_WATT=1 environment variables prior to initializing the phoronix-test-suite).
The OpenGL benchmarks that could run on all 27 of the NVIDIA graphics cards included Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Furmark, OpenArena, Tesseract, Team Fortress 2, Unigine Valley, Xonotic, and Unigine Tropics. The GeForce 8 through GTX 200 series hardware was limited to OpenGL 3.3 test cases. With the GeForce GTX 400 Fermi hardware and newer, I also ran extra tests of BioShock Infinite and Metro Last Light Redux for these OpenGL 4.1 Steam Linux games.
On the following pages are these Linux OpenGL benchmark results for the GeForce 8 series through the GeForce GTX 900 series.