27-Way NVIDIA & AMD Graphics Card Benchmarks On Linux
After last week delivering a 21-way graphics card comparison on Linux using the open-source Intel, Radeon, and NVIDIA (Nouveau) graphics drivers, this week at Phoronix we have a 27-way graphics card. This time around all of the graphics cards were tested using the closed-source/proprietary AMD Catalyst and NVIDIA graphics drivers.
Twenty-seven different AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards were tested over the past week using the latest binary Linux drivers: AMD Catalyst 13.11 Beta v9.4 and NVIDIA 331.20. All testing happened from an Intel Core i7 4770K "Haswell" system running at 4.40GHz and with Ubuntu 13.10 x86_64 using the mainline Linux 3.12 kernel.
The results should be very interesting given that the NVIDIA Windows vs. Linux performance is nearly identical but as testing has shown the AMD Radeon R9 290 is disappointing on Linux even with the latest drivers while NVIDIA's GeForce 700 series is running superb. Testing 27 different graphics cards on the same hardware/software stack adds more perspective to the Linux GPU/driver situation.
On the NVIDIA side the graphics cards tested spanned from the GeForce GTX 780 Ti / TITAN all the way back to the GeFoce 8 series, the oldest NVIDIA GPUs still supported by their mainline Linux graphics driver. On the AMD side the graphics cards ranged from the Radeon R9 290 back through the Radeon HD 5000 series, which is the oldest generation supported by their mainline Catalyst Linux driver. The Catalyst Legacy driver doesn't support Ubuntu 13.10 so we couldn't test any older hardware on the closed-source driver.
A range of OpenGL benchmarks were done on the hardware from Counter-Strike: Source to Xonotic, all done via the Phoronix Test Suite. Here's the full listing of the graphics cards tested:
01: Radeon HD 5750
02: Radeon HD 5830
03: Radeon HD 6770
04: Radeon HD 6870
05: Radeon HD 6950
06: Radeon HD 7850
07: Radeon HD 7950
08: Radeon R9 270X
09: Radeon R9 290
10: GeForce 8500GT
11: GeForce 8800GT
12: GeForce 9500GT
13: GeForce 9600GSO
14: GeForce 9800GT
15: GeForce 9800GTX
16: GeForce GT 220
17: GeForce GT 240
18: GeForce GTX 460
19: GeForce GT 520
20: GeForce GTX 550 Ti
21: GeForce GT 610
22: GeForce GTX 650
23: GeForce GTX 680
24: GeForce GTX 760
25: GeForce GTX 770
26: GeForce GTX TITAN
27: GeForce GTX 780 Ti
The range of graphics cards tested were limited by the hardware supported by the mainline NVIDIA/AMD drivers and the hardware available. There were more NVIDIA GPUs tested than AMD since their mainline driver supports hardware going back longer than AMD and because at Phoronix there's now more NVIDIA GPUs than AMD, since AMD hasn't been supplying review samples to Phoronix recently since they have lost interest in Linux testing or just trying to cover up their current Catalyst driver issues with Steam Linux games. Thus most of the recent AMD graphics cards tested at Phoronix are graphics cards Phoronix Media had to purchase; to help out the site please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium. Besides hardware costs, these tests are very time consuming and Linux tests like these can't be found anywhere else on the web. Phoronix Premium also allows reading multiple page articles (such as this large comparison) on a single-page and ad-free.