A Lot Of New NVIDIA Linux Benchmarks Are Coming!
While I founded Phoronix.com nine and a half years ago as a site devoted to Linux hardware reviews, news, and benchmarking, much of that time has been spent on hiatus with NVIDIA PR for whatever reason(s). NVIDIA's AIB partners had sent out many GPUs in the past and NVIDIA's Unix/Linux driver developers have bought graphics cards for Phoronix as review samples, but getting hardware out of NVIDIA's PR/marketing departments have been difficult when it comes to samples for Linux reviews. (NVIDIA's Linux developers were frustrated in the past at the issue to the point of sending out hardware themselves.) Fortunately, with the rise of Steam gaming on Linux and other milestones, it seems times have finally turned.
Last week I was offered in an unsolicited email, "Need some GeForce GPUs? Looks like you need some 700-series GPUs to get you current. What’s your shipping address?" Then next I know their senior PR manager (who hadn't went through with samples in the past) had sent out four high-end and ultra high-end graphics cards for review on Linux and also introduced me to other staff.
As of yesterday, inside the Phoronix labs are now a NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN, GTX 780 Ti, GTX 770, and GTX 760! This is much more interesting hardware than the older GTX 680 that was kindly supplied by NVIDIA's Hardy Doelfel or the GTX 460 that was sent over by NVIDIA's Andy Ritger, both of their Linux driver team. Then the other graphics cards like the GeForce GT 610 and GeForce GTX 650 that I had personally purchased.
Yesterday I mentioned I also had to buy a Radeon R9 290 for a Hawaii graphics card test on Linux, but with this article doesn't come any early tests of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN, GTX 780 Ti, GTX 770, and GTX 760 as they were just received and other Linux benchmarks are still ongoing. However, this article is to let you know Linux reviews on each of these individual graphics cards will be forthcoming in the coming days/weeks. These graphics card reviews will be definitely worth reading with plenty of interesting benchmarks!
Beyond the Linux reviews on these new NVIDIA Kepler graphics cards, there will also be open-source Nouveau driver benchmarks and the other usual Phoronix benchmarks from these graphics cards. Is there anything else you would like to see at this time? Any other special benchmark requests?
For those having benchmark requests, the list of available tests can be found from this OpenBenchmarking.org page for the various OpenGL and OpenCL workloads. If there isn't a test you would like listed there, it's very easy to create new test profiles. You can see example test profile contents for the Phoronix Test Suite with workloads like Xonotic or Team Fortress 2. New patches are gladly accepted upstream.
In the evaluation of creating new Linux tests or for future Phoronix articles looking at Linux graphics performance, comments are especially appreciated from Phoronix Premium subscribers and with PayPal contributors. The work is very time consuming, energy costs are expensive, and there's the associated hardware costs outside of this great contribution by NVIDIA. Feedback for future tests and articles can be sent via @MichaelLarabel on Twitter, MichaelLarabel.com, or the Phoronix Forums.
Thanks again to NVIDIA for the great hardware samples and stay tuned for a wealth of new Linux graphics hardware / driver articles!
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