NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti "Maxwell": A Great Mid-Range GPU For Linux Users

We first got started by running our most basic OpenGL benchmark used at Phoronix in GPU testing... OpenArena. OpenArena can easily run on any modest GPU and the binary drivers, but should yield some interesting perspective for how well the GTX 750 Ti is running compared to previous generation GPUs. The GeForce GTX 750 Ti in this first test was running almost exactly twice the speed of the previous-generation GeForce GTX 550 Ti and GTX 650. The GTX 750 Ti had twice the frame-rate of the GTX 550/650 while consuming just 60 Watts of power compared to ~116 Watts on these earlier NVIDIA GPUs.

AMD's comparable GPU to the GeForce GTX 750 Ti is the similarly priced Radeon R7 260X. With OpenArena, the GeForce GTX 750 Ti ran at 139 FPS in comparison to the Radeon R7 260X at 128 FPS, or a 9% advantage in favor of Maxwell.

NVIDIA's Maxwell is off to a great start. While not the focus of this article, for those looking at the higher-end Linux GPU results in this article and surprised by the poor Radeon R9 290 "Hawaii" Linux OpenGL performance... It's not much of a surprise. AMD Radeon R9 290: Still Not Good For Linux Users covers the current Catalyst Linux performance difficulties for the new AMD GPUs.

Unigine Corp's benchmarks are the most demanding OpenGL workloads natively available for Linux at this time. With the GeForce GTX 750 Ti on the 334.16 Beta driver there was an average frame-rate in Unigine Heaven at 1920 x 1080 of 33 FPS. The Maxwell performance is still nearly double that of the earlier GTX 550 Ti and GTX 650 graphics cards that were at 15~17 FPS; running at around the same speed to these older GPUs was the GeForce GTX 460 that came in at 17 FPS while its TDP was 150 Watts.

The GeForce GTX 750 Ti also continued beating out the Radeon R7 260X on the AMD side and in Unigine Heaven was just two frames away from hitting the Radeon R9 270X.