NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 vs. 760 vs. 960 vs. 1060 Linux Performance

To complement yesterday's launch-day GeForce GTX 1060 Linux review, here are some more benchmark results with the various NVIDIA x60 graphics cards I have available for testing going back to the GeForce GTX 460 Fermi. If you are curious about the raw OpenGL/OpenCL/CUDA performance and performance-per-Watt for these mid-range x60 graphics cards from Fermi, Kepler, Maxwell, and Pascal, here are these benchmarks from Ubuntu 16.04 Linux.

The x60 cards I have in my possession going back to Fermi are the GeForce GTX 460 Fermi, GTX 760 Kepler, GTX 960 Maxwell, and GTX 1060 Pascal. All of these tests were done with the NVIDIA 367.27 proprietary Linux driver. I didn't go back further than Fermi since that support is provided by the NVIDIA legacy Linux driver. Tests were done from the same Intel Xeon Skylake system running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with the Linux 4.4 kernel.

A variety of OpenGL, OpenCL, and CUDA benchmarks were run that offer native Linux support and are capable of running going back to Fermi -- thus why no Vulkan tests could be done for this article. With each benchmark run via the open-source Phoronix Test Suite, the AC system power consumption was measured via a WattsUp Pro power meter. With the Phoronix Test Suite systematically running all of the tests and accurately recording the power use, performance-per-Watt metrics were also generated automatically (via the PERFORMANCE_PER_WATT=1 environment variable for the Phoronix Test Suite.

On the pages ahead are this look from the GeForce GTX 460 to GTX 1060. Of course, if you are a Phoronix Premium member, this entire article is rendered ad-free and on a single page. Consider joining today to help support all our Linux hardware testing efforts.