NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Dominates With OpenCL On Linux

The GTX 980 secured another very significant win OpenCL performance, this time for the OpenDwarfs benchmark.

Here's a look at the GPU thermal and system power consumption data spanning all of the OpenCL benchmarks executed:

The GPU core temperature for the GTX 980 averaged out to 66 Celsius across all the benchmarks ran in this article with a peak of 80C. The thermal performance is close to that of the GTX 780 Ti and ahead of the Radeon R9 290 for the GPGPU benchmarking.

On the system power consumption front, the GeForce GTX 980 is a beauty.

For Linux users able to afford the $500+ USD price of the GeForce GTX 980, this high-end Maxwell graphics card is a true beauty that delivers exceptional performance just not for OpenGL but for OpenCL too under Linux. The power efficiency makes the GeForce GTX 980 even more of a stellar offering. Though if you're a strict open-source fan and not willing to use proprietary graphics drivers, NVIDIA hardware will still not make you happy. Among the Intel and AMD Radeon graphics with better open-source GPU support, their OpenCL compute stacks still aren't ideal and your mileage may vary. Hopefully in 2015 we'll see more Linux/open-source desktop software finally taking advantage of OpenCL.