NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti Steams Ahead On Linux

The review today is examining the GeForce GTX 780 Ti but the results on the GeForce GTX 760, GTX 770, and GTX TITAN have been included too; their independent Linux reviews will be posted on Phoronix in the coming days. The complete list of graphics cards tested for this article include the:

- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN
- AMD Radeon HD 6870
- AMD Radeon HD 6950
- AMD Radeon HD 7850
- AMD Radeon HD 7950
- AMD Radeon R9 270X
- AMD Radeon R9 290

Unfortunately the NVIDIA binary Linux driver hasn't supported its CoolBits overclocking on Fermi or Kepler GPUs, so as a result it's not possible today to run any overclocking benchmarks on the GTX 780 Ti or the other new NVIDIA GPUs.

The drivers used for this testing included the NVIDIA 331.20 Linux driver and on the AMD side was the Catalyst 13.11 Beta 6; both of these drivers were the latest at the time of testing. The testing happened from an Ubuntu 13.10 x86_64 installation and was upgraded to the Linux 3.12 mainline kernel. All fourteen of these graphics cards were tested from an Intel Core i7 4770K "Haswell" that was overclocked to 4.40GHz and found on an ECS Z87H3-A2X EXTREME motherboard with 16GB of RAM and a 240GB OCZ Vertex 3 SSD.

All benchmarking for this 14-way AMD and NVIDIA graphics card comparison on Ubuntu Linux was facilitated via our Phoronix Test Suite open-source benchmarking platform and OpenBenchmarking.org cloud service. The Phoronix Test Suite allows for conducting our (and its thousands of other organizations relying upon it) Linux/Windows/BSD/Solaris/OSX tests in a fully automated and reproducible manner. The complete process from test downloading and installation to execution and result reporting is fully automated and done in a standardized and reproducible manner. With that said, for the Phoronix.com readers that enjoy comparing their own systems against our results, you can continue to easily see how your own system performs. Simply install the Phoronix Test Suite and from the command-line run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1311212-SO-GTX780TIN09 to carry out the same tests with the same settings on your own system and seeing side-by-side how the results compare to the 14 graphics cards.

Now let's get to the results to see how NVIDIA's new hardware is running on Linux! First up are all the OpenGL tests followed by the thermal data and power consumption / performance-per-Watt information. Thanks again to NVIDIA for sending out the GeForce 700 series hardware. For those readers that appreciate the work done with this Linux hardware testing and the efforts that are invested into the publicly available Phoronix Test Suite client software, please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium.