GeForce 700 vs. Radeon Rx 200 Series With The Latest Linux Drivers
Using the Catalyst 14.4 release candidate and the NVIDIA 337.12 beta driver as the latest AMD/NVIDIA Linux proprietary graphics drivers available at the time of testing, I compared my complete assortment of AMD Radeon Rx 200 series graphics cards against all available NVIDIA GeForce 700 series graphics cards to see how these latest-generation GPUs compare on the newest graphics drivers as of this month.
With the Catalyst 14.4 RC and NVIDIA 337.12 Beta, the following graphics cards were benchmarked in a range of OpenGL benchmarks on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS:
- AMD Radeon R7 260X
- AMD Radeon R9 270X
- AMD Radeon R9 290
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN
The hardware used for this comparison was limited to the hardware I had available to me... For the NVIDIA side with the Kepler/Maxwell GPUs this means practically the entire assortment of GPUs, plus the GeForce GTX TITAN, all of which except for the GTX 750 (non-Ti) were supplied by NVIDIA as review samples. On the AMD side of the Rx 200 series GPUs, there's just three cards I have on hand -- of which, the R9 270X and R9 290 I bought while the third came via Sapphire. The reasons range at AMD why I haven't been seeing much new graphics hardware lately, from GPUs being expensive to there not being huge Linux demand, thus unfortunately there's only a limited range of AMD's newest hardware to look at under Linux. Serious Linux gamers not committed to using open-source Linux drivers tend to prefer NVIDIA anyhow over their superior proprietary graphics drivers.
All of this NVIDIA/AMD Linux benchmarking on the latest software drivers was done on an Intel Core i7 4770K Haswell system. The benchmarking from start-to-finish was handled in a fully automated and reproducible manner using the widely-used Phoronix Test Suite testing software.
The drivers were left in their stock configurations -- as was the Ubuntu operating system -- during testing. Those wishing to see more details on the test results or to reproduce the tests on your own hardware, it's very easy to do so with the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org. To reproduce the tests 1-for-1 with your own system compared to all of the hardware in this article, simply install the Phoronix Test Suite on the distribution of your choice and then run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1404256-KH-AMDNVIDIA73.