NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 On Linux: OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan Performance
Besides running plenty of raw OpenGL performance benchmarks, following those Linux gaming performance figures are system power consumption numbers, performance-per-Watt calculations, GPU thermal stressing, and more. All of that was done in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using our open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. The Phoronix Test Suite was interfacing with a USB-based WattsUp Pro power meter for providing the system power consumption numbers during testing.
The batch of results coming out today are just my initial GTX 1080 Linux numbers after using the card for a few days. More articles are still on the way along with some fun comparisons like seeing how the GTX 1080 performance-per-Watt compares to hardware going back to the GeForce 9800GTX!
For this initial Linux GPU comparison, I tested the GeForce GTX 1080 against many of its Kepler and Maxwell siblings: GTX 680, GTX 760, GTX 770, GTX 780 Ti, GTX 950, GTX 960, GTX 970, GTX 980, GTX 980 Ti, and GTX TITAN X. I went a bit overboard on testing the Kepler/Maxwell spectrum of cards in case you currently have one of those lower-end models and want to know precisely how much faster you can expect the GTX 1080 to be. The cards I tested on the AMD side that I had available were the Radeon R9 285, R9 290, R7 370, and R9 Fury. The cards are limited by hardware I have access to and unfortunately I have far more NVIDIA cards than Radeon cards, due to AMD not sending out many GPUs, but anyhow given the current state of the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver even with say a Fury X it wouldn't have added too much value to this comparison.
All of the testing happened on a Xeon E3-1280 v5 Skylake system running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. All of the NVIDIA tests were done with the 367.18 beta driver release. The AMD tests were done with their latest open-source driver code with what's found in Linux 4.6.0 and Mesa 11.3-dev Git from last weekend (just before the 12.0 branching).
That should cover all of the bases. So let's start with the many OpenGL and OpenCL tests followed by the performance-per-Watt and other goodies.