NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090/4080 Linux Compute CUDA & OpenCL Benchmarks, Blender Performance
Last week I published a number of Linux gaming benchmarks for the GeForce RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 high-end graphics cards now that they finally arrived for my Linux testing on Phoronix. For those more interested in creator workloads and GPU OpenCL and CUDA compute performance for these high-end consumer Ada Lovelace graphics cards, this article is for you with an initial look at the compute performance across a wide range of workloads from Blender OptiX and CUDA rendering to common OpenCL GPU benchmarks.
Today's article is a straight-forward comparison to look at the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080/4090 graphics cards across a range of GPU compute benchmarks. In addition to looking at the raw performance, the power efficiency with performance-per-Watt as well as GPU thermals were monitored too for this mix of workloads.
While originally the plan was for this GPU compute article to be an AMD Radeon vs. NVIDIA GeForce comparison, it didn't end up working out so well on the AMD side. Besides many of the binary-only (CUDA) benchmarks being incompatible with the AMD ROCm compute stack, even for the common OpenCL benchmarks there were problems testing the latest driver build; the Radeon RX 7900 XTX was hitting OpenCL "out of host memory" errors when initializing the OpenCL driver with the RDNA3 GPUs. So with those issues plus the AMD ROCm compute stack still being hit or miss depending upon the particular consumer GPU, this article ended up just being a generational look at the NVIDIA compute performance on Ubuntu Linux.
The graphics cards tested for this NVIDIA generational look at Linux performance included the:
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti
- NVIDIA GeForce TITAN RTX
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090
All of the graphics cards were freshly (re)tested while using the NVIDIA 525.89.02 driver on the Linux 6.2 kernel atop Ubuntu 22.10 with the Ryzen 9 7950X desktop. Thanks to NVIDIA for providing the graphics card review samples for Linux testing on Phoronix.
Let's see how the new NVIDIA RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 graphics cards are looking for the compute performance.