Linux Benchmarks Of NVIDIA's Early 2015 GeForce Line-Up

Lastly is looking at the GeForce GTX 960's efficiency when running the LuxMark OpenGL benchmark...

The GTX 960 power use remained lower than the Kepler GTX 760 and still lower than the Fermi GTX 460.

Those wishing to explore the power and thermal data more can investigate this OpenBenchmarking.org result file that contains the various data points from the Phoronix Test Suite.

Given the great OpenCL compute improvements with Maxwell, the GTX 960 performance-per-Watt rises to 2.67x that of the GTX 760! If comparing back to the old GTX 460, the difference is a factor of 3.57 times.

While in not all of the benchmarks of the GTX 960's OpenGL Linux performance was it well ahead of the GTX 760, when it comes to the power efficiency, this new Maxwell GPU is a very nice upgrade over the Kepler (and older Fermi) graphics processors as showed by the many benchmarks in this article. For the results where the GTX 960 was close to the GTX 760 (or in the case of Xonotic, the results reversed), I'm checking with the NVIDIA Linux driver team for any insight or to see if further Linux optimizations for the GTX 960 and other Maxwell graphics cards are expected. Overall though, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 is a very compelling offering for those Linux gamers and desktop users looking at the $200 price point.

Coming up next will be the AMD vs. NVIDIA Linux results for the OpenGL tests that play nicely with the latest Catalyst Linux driver on Ubuntu.

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