GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Linux Benchmarks Coming Today, NVIDIA Driver Bringing Vulkan RTX

NVIDIA's review/performance embargo has now lifted on the GeForce RTX 2080 series ahead of the cards shipping tomorrow. I should have out initial Linux benchmarks later today, assuming Linux driver availability.

As wrote about yesterday, just yesterday I ended up receiving the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti for Linux benchmarking. But, unfortunately, no Linux driver yet... But I am told it will be posted publicly soon with the Windows driver. Assuming that happens within the hours ahead, I'll still have initial RTX 2080 Ti benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux out by today's end -- thanks to the Phoronix Test Suite and recently wrapping up other NVIDIA/AMD GPU comparison tests on the current drivers.

Without the official Linux driver and there being no Turing support yet in the (feature-limited) open-source Nouveau driver, since yesterday I've so far only been able to rock out with this $1,199 USD graphics card using the FBDEV frame-buffer driver at 1024 x 768. (One of the benefits of the open-source Intel and Radeon drivers these days is their mainline kernel support ahead of launch, avoiding these driver situations. It's unfortunate that NVIDIA at least can't help square away KMS mode-setting support for Nouveau ahead of new GPU launches...) I wouldn't hold my breath on any good open-source Turing 3D/GPU support in general though considering Maxwell and Pascal GPUs are still in rough shape due to the re-clocking issue and currently being stuck to their (low) clock speeds programmed at boot time by the video BIOS.

Anyhow, driver and hardware access headaches aside, I am genuinely very excited to get going with the GeForce RTX 2080 series on Linux... Quite excited to see how fast the Turing GPUs will perform for OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenCL, and CUDA workloads on Linux compared to the GTX 1080 series... Stay tuned for initial benchmarks later in the day.

One exciting tid-bit I was able to confirm: the initial Turing Linux drivers should support the new Vulkan RTX extension that NVIDIA has been working on to complement their Direct3D 12 ray-tracing support. Details still light, but the beta implementation of their proposed Vulkan ray-tracing support will be included with this driver and the official extension at a later date in the not too distant future.