NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 / RTX 4090 Linux Performance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 / RTX 4090 Linux Performance

Recently we finally received the GeForce RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 graphics cards for Linux testing from NVIDIA. For those that have been eager to see how the RTX 40 series hardware performs under Linux, here are my initial Linux gaming benchmarks featuring a variety of Linux native titles as well as with Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux atop Proton + DXVK/VKD3D-Proton. The GeForce RTX 4080/4090 Linux performance is compared against a variety of other graphics cards including the new Radeon RX 7900 XTX with its open-source upstream Linux driver support.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-rtx4080-rtx4090-linux

[Barley9432]

Good to see NVIDIA still properly supporting their drivers on Linux. Unlike AMD which has a fragmented userspace with three or so Vulkan drivers NVIDIA focuses on one driver that works well and doesn't depend on Valve doing their work for them.

Hell, didn't even see any performance oddities on NVIDIA, only AMD cards.

[dreamcat4]

Phoronix: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 / RTX 4090 Linux Performance
https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvid...-rtx4090-linux

thank you so much for this artical finally! and was worth waiting for. much love, all the best now

^ && hope you can also spend a little time to enjoy these new 40 series cards on linux. (as am also hoping for myself soon. just gotta save up a bit more)

[user1]

Good to see NVIDIA still properly supporting their drivers on Linux.

The way Nvidia supports Linux (not using Linux's Mesa/DRM driver infrastructure) is the same as theoretically not using the WDDM driver infrastructure on Windows. I wouldn't call that "proper support". Luckily, in Windows world MS would've not let anyone make a driver that doesn't use WDDM, but here on Linux we unfortunately don't have this luxury, so as a result these "properly supported" drivers give you screen tearing on X, poor Wayland stability and breakages with kernel updates. I'm not saying Intel and AMD are perfect. Yes, they have their own share of bugs, but when someone thinks Nvidia is better on Linux, I can't help but laugh.

[clapbr]

The way Nvidia supports Linux (not using Linux's Mesa/DRM driver infrastructure) is the same as theoretically not using the WDDM driver infrastructure on Windows. I wouldn't call that "proper support". Luckily, in Windows world MS would've not let anyone make a driver that doesn't use WDDM, but here on Linux we unfortunately don't have this luxury, so as a result these "properly supported" drivers give you screen tearing on X, poor Wayland stability and breakages with kernel updates. I'm not saying Intel and AMD are perfect. Yes, they have their own share of bugs, but when someone thinks Nvidia is better on Linux, I can't help but laugh.

As an owner of GPUs from both vendors, I agree with this. It may perform better on gaming/compute tasks but the overall desktop experience is shit on any modern composited DE because anything using the GPU stutter everything else with just a threat of a fart.

[brucethemoose]

Up next on the RTX 4080/4090 Linux front is a look at the Blender performance as well as a variety of OpenCL and CUDA compute benchmarks.

This is really what the 4090 is for, its a Titan/Quadro/Tesla in disguise.

I know some people enjoy their 4090s purely for gaming, but it seems particularly superfluous this generation. Maybe thats cause I am into builder/sim games that are more CPU bottlenecked, and raytracing isnt a make or break feature in anything I've seen.


... Does anyone else here on Phoronix feel the CPU bottleneck in Rimworld, Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress, Stellaris, Dyson Sphere Program, Starsector and so on? This is where I want all my performance nowadays.

[ColdDistance]

The way Nvidia supports Linux (not using Linux's Mesa/DRM driver infrastructure) is the same as theoretically not using the WDDM driver infrastructure on Windows. I wouldn't call that "proper support". Luckily, in Windows world MS would've not let anyone make a driver that doesn't use WDDM, but here on Linux we unfortunately don't have this luxury, so as a result these "properly supported" drivers give you screen tearing on X, poor Wayland stability and breakages with kernel updates. I'm not saying Intel and AMD are perfect. Yes, they have their own share of bugs, but when someone thinks Nvidia is better on Linux, I can't help but laugh.

I was using NVIDIA cards for almost five years. The performance was always good, so my complaint is around tons of artifacts, specially screen tearing on Xorg and mostly outside of GNOME. I haven't use KDE Plasma for many years and since 2017 I switched to Radeon, but I see people that even today need to force triple buffering on KDE Plasma to get a clean experience, many times with the cost of a noticeable lag.

NVIDIA can sell the best GPU on the planet, but as long as it doesn't offer support through that standard graphics stack, I will not buy a NVIDIA GPU anymore. I don't want to fight to see the graphics working with a clean experience.

[user1]

It may perform better on gaming/compute tasks

I would say it's better for compute and ray tracing, but gaming in general is more of a mixed bag. In many cases AMD actually performs better in certain games, especially those that use OpenGL.

[avis]

The way Nvidia supports Linux (not using Linux's Mesa/DRM driver infrastructure) is the same as theoretically not using the WDDM driver infrastructure on Windows. I wouldn't call that "proper support". Luckily, in Windows world MS would've not let anyone make a driver that doesn't use WDDM, but here on Linux we unfortunately don't have this luxury, so as a result these "properly supported" drivers give you screen tearing on X, poor Wayland stability and breakages with kernel updates. I'm not saying Intel and AMD are perfect. Yes, they have their own share of bugs, but when someone thinks Nvidia is better on Linux, I can't help but laugh.

1. Haven't had screen tearing for over a decade now thanks to

    Option      "metamodes" "nvidia-auto-select +0+0 {ForceCompositionPipeline=On, ForceFullCompositionPipeline=On}"

Try it, it works. Besides tearing is not an NVIDIA issue, it's an Xorg issue. There's none under Wayland (which doesn't work perfectly - no need to remind me of that).

2. "Poor Wayland stability" will be resolved sooner or later when enterprise starts to use it. So far all the major professional applications work perfectly under Xorg. There's also an issue of outdated Wayland design in terms of synchronization which is not NVIDIA's fault and which is the main reason behind their most recent struggles.

3. "Breakages with the Linux kernel" has been a non-issue for 99% of Linux users out there for quite some time now. In fact I've been using the vanilla kernel since forever (late 90s) and I last had issues maybe five years ago. The vast majority of Linux users have what their distro has in store and they weren't really affected.

4. NVIDIA is indeed better in terms of gaming and graphics standards support (OpenGL, Vulkan). OpenCL is a different story but NVIDIA has a much more powerful proprietary solution pretty much the entire world uses.

5. Lastly, NVIDIA has a much better regression testing. I welcome you to AMD's bug tracker to get a sense of how many regressions each Linux kernel has. It doesn't help that you cannot use a certain AMD driver because they are tied to kernel releases - it's yet another Linux kernel "perk". On the other hand with NVIDIA you can use any of the last let's say three to ten releases depending on your kernel version.

6. NVIDIA Linux drivers absolutely have a fair share of serious issues but you've not listed any of them. The ones you've listed are irrelevant.

"I can't help but laugh" - sorry, couldn't help repeating you.

[piotrj3]

The way Nvidia supports Linux (not using Linux's Mesa/DRM driver infrastructure) is the same as theoretically not using the WDDM driver infrastructure on Windows. I wouldn't call that "proper support". Luckily, in Windows world MS would've not let anyone make a driver that doesn't use WDDM, but here on Linux we unfortunately don't have this luxury, so as a result these "properly supported" drivers give you screen tearing on X, poor Wayland stability and breakages with kernel updates. I'm not saying Intel and AMD are perfect. Yes, they have their own share of bugs, but when someone thinks Nvidia is better on Linux, I can't help but laugh.

As far as I know, there is no WDDM equalivent in Linux in Wayland. There sort of is one in X server (And X server is taking responsibility of ordering opengl etc. calls in right order), but Wayland with its situation doesn't have such thing. Its responsiblity suddenly is moved towards driver and driver based on implicit synchronization (lol) has to guess what is done in what order. Nvidia kind of doesn't understand implicit world (and implicit world pisses off Vulkan developers) and we have an issue.

Just to know context, Windows has own scheduler, manager of memory, etc. - dxgkrnl.sys . This thing sets fences, says what calls are done in what order and talks to driver. It is very clean what is responsibility of Microsoft and what is responsibility of Intel/Nvidia/AMD. And GPU makers only need to know how to talk to dxgkrnl.sys and that is most of their responsibility.

In fact it is impossible for any GPU to work in Windows world without supporting WDDM architecture. GPU simply wouldn't receive graphics calls and.. die. Of course there is part of ecosystem that goes around dxgkrnl (for example Nvapi, and how Vulkan works is part of that) but it is not required to make good desktop expierience in windows.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/wi...ecommendations

Personally if there are 3 things that i wanted the most from linux graphics ecosystem is something like dxgkrnl and explicit synchronization and making part of Wayland standard stuff like screen recording, how hotkeys are supposed to work etc..

And just so you are aware, look at Micheals benchmarks. Track them for 1+ year. And you will see tons of situations of sort when Micheal tests game it doesn't work on AMD but does work on Nvidia, but there will be almost none of such situation nvidia doesn't work. When Mesa and DEs that are written for Mesa indeed work better with open source, 3rd party programs work better on Nvidia.