Ultra HD 4K Linux Graphics Card Testing

If you've been eyeing a purchase of a 4K "Ultra HD" TV this holiday season and will be connecting it to a Linux system, here's the information that you need to know for getting started and some performance benchmarks to set the expectations for what you can expect. This article has a number of AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce benchmarks when running various Linux OpenGL workloads at a resolution of 3840 x 2160.

For delivering our first Ultra HD 4K Linux tests I had purchased a Seiki 39-inch SE39UY04 4K TV. The Seiki SE39UY04 is one of the most affordable Ultra HD TVs on the market with the price on it having fallen in recent days to below $500 USD. I managed to purchase the Seiki 4K TV for $490 USD from Amazon.com (please use our affiliate link when shopping at Amazon.com, thanks!). The 120Hz LED TV launched this past summer and has a native panel resolution of 3840 x 2160 and 5000:1 contrast ratio.

The Seiki SE39UY04 is far from being the best Ultra HDTV on the market, but its price is unbeatable and it works out well for carrying out 4K Linux graphics card benchmarks at Phoronix. Seiki also manufactures similar Ultra HD displays in 50, 55, and 65-inch versions.

For this initial Linux 4K graphics card testing at Phoronix all of the GPUs were tested from an Intel Core i7 3770K "Ivy Bridge" system running Ubuntu 13.10 x86_64. On the following page are the compatibility notes for getting graphics cards running at the 3840 x 2160 resolution under Linux followed by some NVIDIA and AMD performance benchmarks.