NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN: Windows 8.1 vs. Ubuntu 13.10 Linux

For Linux gamers the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti obviously makes the most sense since its priced $300 less than the GTX TITAN (currently ~$699 USD for the GTX 780 Ti) and its performance in OpenGL workloads is faster than the GTX TITAN. However, the thousand dollar graphics card from NVIDIA still has its advantages when it comes to double-precision compute performance in GPGPU workloads or those users that need 6GB of video memory. There will be (OpenCL) GPGPU Linux benchmarks of the GTX TITAN and other NVIDIA graphics cards coming out shortly on Phoronix.

If you do end up purchasing a NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN, the results show in this article that the performance between Windows 8.1 Pro x64 is right in line with Ubuntu 13.10 Linux when using the binary NVIDIA drivers. As I outlined in the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti review, I highly recommend the GeForce 700 series if you don't care whether the GPU driver is open or closed-source.

If you are concerned about using open-source GPU Linux drivers, the Intel driver is completely open-source or there's the AMD Radeon open-source driver that complements the Catalyst driver. For the open-source AMD driver you really need a Radeon HD 5000/6000 series graphics card for the best open-source OpenGL performance and feature-set at this point.

For Phoronix.com readers that enjoy comparing their own systems against our results, you can continue to easily see how your own system performs as always via our open-source benchmarking software that delivers fully-automated and reproducible tests from start to finish. Simply install the Phoronix Test Suite and from the command-line run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1311212-SO-GTX780TIN09.

The binary NVIDIA Linux driver continues to work wonderfully for most Linux users and in my time of running the GTX TITAN so far I have no complaints. The only item that I can really fault NVIDIA on at this time is their lack of GPU overclocking support under Linux with their modern graphics processors.

Besides having a new round of NVIDIA/AMD OpenCL Linux benchmarks forthcoming, there's also 4K / Ultra HD Linux gaming benchmarks coming shortly, a look at the Nouveau driver on the GeForce 700 series, and other Linux GPU benchmarking articles and reviews. Your feedback is welcome via the forums or @MichaelLarabel. If you appreciate this time-intensive Linux hardware testing that can't be found anywhere else, please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium. Thanks again to NVIDIA for the new GeForce 700 series review samples and their greater interest in Linux. Nice job to the involved developers in delivering a Linux driver that remains on par with the Microsoft Windows 8.1 driver.