NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 On Linux

Now that you know the GeForce GTX 400 Linux support is nearly on target with NVIDIA's Windows support when using their official driver, it is time to look at how the GeForce GTX 460 768MB graphics card actually performs on Linux. We have our traditional gaming/OpenGL performance benchmarks along with a look at the OpenCL, video playback, and thermal/CPU usage results. The test system throughout all of this consisted of an Intel Core i7 920 CPU overclocked to 3.60GHz, an ASRock X58 SuperComputer motherboard with an X58 + ICH10R chipset, 3GB of DDR3 system memory, 320GB Seagate ST3320620AS SATA HDD, an OCZ ModXStream 600W power supply, and all of this was housed within a SilverStone Raven chassis.

The software make-up consisted of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (x86_64) with the Linux 2.6.32 kernel, GNOME 2.30 desktop, X.Org Server 1.7.6, GCC 4.4.3, and an EXT4 file-system. The drivers we used for testing was the NVIDIA 256.44 display driver that provides OpenGL 4.0.0 support for the GeForce GTX 460 and OpenGL 3.3.0 support for the other NVIDIA graphics cards we tested. On the ATI side we used the Catalyst 10.7 Linux release that uses the fglrx 8.75.5 driver. Besides running the GeForce GTX 460 at its stock speeds (and no overclocking due to the current Linux limitation) we also benchmarked the NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX and the low-end NVIDIA GeForce GT 240 for reference. On the ATI side there was the Radeon HD 4890, Radeon HD 5750, and Radeon HD 5770 graphics cards. Unfortunately, with not having access to much NVIDIA hardware lately, these were the closest graphics cards we had to being the respectively comparable graphics cards to the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 that we had available for benchmarking. While belonging to the previous-generation family, the ATI Radeon HD 4890 still can be found for $190~210 USD, which puts it in the same price range as the GeForce GTX 460 768MB, but it's the ATI Radeon HD 5830/5850 that is viewed as the principal competition to the GF104.

For our performance testing we used Nexuiz, Lightsmark, Unigine Sanctuary, Unigine Tropics, Unigine Heaven, VDrift, and gluxMark as the basis of our Linux benchmarks. With all of the testing being done automatically via the Phoronix Test Suite, each of the test profiles was run at 1280 x 1024, 1600 x 1200, 1920 x 1080, and 2560 x 1600, to look at the scaling performance and see how the graphics card's performance is relevant to you depending upon your preferred resolution. The monitor used during our testing was the Samsung SyncMaster 305T. Let us get to looking at the OpenGL performance before examining the other areas of the GeForce GTX 460 performance.