The Most Innovative ~$50 Graphics Card For Linux Users

The GeForce GT 710 really isn't capable for gaming but for desktop use-cases and other light graphics tasks using the Nouveau driver when manually re-clocking to the highest performance state via DebugFS is about as capable as the NVIDIA driver. Here were some quick tests done of the NVIDIA 450.36.06 proprietary driver to the Nouveau stack in the form of Linux 5.9 + Mesa 20.3-dev for this re-clocked Kepler budget card:

For the Java OpenGL pipeline tests, the Nouveau driver stack even worked out better than the NVIDIA driver. In the other tests the performance tended to be roughly comparable to the proprietary NVIDIA driver for this passively-cooled GT 710 graphics card, including for browser graphics tests.

Don't expect much out of this graphics card but for those wanting more performance figures with this passive ASUS GeForce GT 710 2GB graphics card, there is this OpenBenchmarking.org result file with Vulkan compute tests, CUDA, Caffe, OpenCL, and some open-source games among other tests...

Under those demanding workloads, the ASUS GT710-4H-SL-2GD5 had an average temperature around 74 degrees.

If looking solely for a budget graphics card, just need to drive four displays for basic purposes, in need of a PCI Express x1 or passive low-end GPU, and want something that is backed with fully free software driver support this ASUS GT710-4H-SL-2GD5 is in a unique position to fit those characteristics at just around $50 USD.