OpenGL Performance & Performance-Per-Watt For NVIDIA GPUs From The Past 10 Years

First up are the OpenGL 4 benchmarks that just ran on the GeForce GTX 400 graphics cards and newer, followed by the OpenGL 3 results.

Even when just seeing how the GeForce GTX 900 series have advanced from the GeForce 500 and 600 series is impressive for the mid-range graphics cards. A GeForce GTX 950 or better is needed to play BioShock Infinite at 2560 x 1600. With the higher-end graphics cards, the performance ended up becoming CPU bound at this resolution and with the game's high settings.

A look at the power consumption while running the BioShock Infinite benchmark...

And then a look at the performance-per-Watt when going from Fermi to Kepler to Maxwell. Even compared to Fermi, Maxwell is far more power efficiency, so the GeForce 8/9 results should be even more interesting.

And the Metro Last Light Redux performance at 2560 x 1600 on Ubuntu Linux... The high-end Kepler cards and newer are able to run this demanding Linux game.

With the greater performance also comes increased power consumption.

But as you can see by this graph, the performance-per-Watt has improved nicely over the Kepler and Fermi hardware. Now let's go look at the OpenGL 2/3 tests for the 27 different graphics cards.