NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 Offers Great Linux Performance

As outlined in my NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Linux review, the Linux support is there but for the foreseeable future you'll really be bound to using the proprietary driver. The Nouveau driver has initial Maxwell support (GTX 750 series) but it's currently bound to using NVIDIA's binary firmware files that right now are a nuisance to extract (but being improved) and there's no re-clocking support so the performance is horrific. Beyond that, there are many features offered by the proprietary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver not currently available via the open-source driver.

When having installed the NVIDIA 343.22 Linux x86_64 driver, it works great with both the GTX 970 and GTX 980. There's only the basic limitations outlined in the GTX 980 review like VDPAU not currently offering any H.265 video acceleration under Linux, but will likely be added to a future driver update.