NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 On Linux: OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan Performance

In addition to the GPU thermal data on the previous page, I did a overnight round of running an even broader range of OpenGL, Vulkan, and OpenCL benchmarks with just the GeForce GTX 1080. During this time I had MONITOR=gpu.temp,gpu.usage,gpu.fan-speed set for the Phoronix Test Suite to monitor the GPU core temperature, GPU utilization, and GPU fan speed. The benchmarks used ranged from Dota 2 to F1 2015 to Unigine to classics like Half-Life 2 Lost Coast and Portal.

During this round of overnight benchmarking that took roughly eight hours, the graph above is the GPU temperature during that time. The GTX 1080 seemed to get the hottest during GpuTest (Furmark) and Unigine, among other scenarios. The average core temperature of this GTX 1080 Founder's Edition card was 64C with a peak of 82C. Again, the maximum temperature rating is 94C, according to NVIDIA.

At the same time as reading the GPU temperature, the Phoronix Test Suite was also checking on the GTX 1080's reported fan-speed as a percent. At least according to this information exposed via NVIDIA's driver API, the GTX 1080 never hit 100% fan speed during the testing. The peak fan speed recorded was 73% while the average fan speed of this Founder's Edition card was 46%. The noise level of this GTX 1080 was right in line with other high-end cards. The only thing puzzling me a bit about the fan speed data is that if the GPU is over 80C, at that point it's my opinion the fan speed should have been closer to 100% to prevent any thermal issues or throttling.

For being clear about the GPU utilization during this overnight benchmarking task, here was the reported GPU utilization during the benchmarking process that matches the graphs above. Basically, the GPU was in fact being fully utilized nearly the entire time.

If you want to dig through these monitoring results further, you can find all of the data from the numbers on this page via this OpenBenchmarking.org page.