NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Linux Performance From Gaming To TensorFlow & Compute
With knowing the RTX 2060 was en route, over the weekend I wrapped up some fresh benchmarks of all the graphics cards for this comparison. The NVIDIA tests were done using the 415.25 driver build, which was the latest publicly available driver at the time of testing. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 did work fine with the 415.25 Linux driver albeit not officially supported: the only limitation to note was just seeing the GPU reported as a NVIDIA "Device" rather than the "RTX 2060", but the next NVIDIA Linux driver update should obviously carry the product string now that the hardware is publicly announced. All of this testing was done from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with the Linux 4.20.0 stable kernel. The NVIDIA graphics cards tested as part of this comparison went back to the Maxwell GPUs and included the GeForce GTX 960, GTX 970, GTX 980, GTX 980 Ti, GTX 1060, GTX 1070, GTX 1070 Ti, GTX 1080, GTX 1080 Ti, RTX 2060, RTX 2070, RTX 2080, RTX 2080 Ti, and TITAN RTX.
On the AMD side, the Linux 4.20 was used as well as the very latest Mesa 19.0-devel RadeonSI/RADV driver from the Padoka PPA. On the Radeon side there were fresh tests done of the Radeon RX 580, RX 590, RX Vega 56, and RX Vega 64.
Making all of this Linux graphics card testing possible was the Phoronix Test Suite for automating the testing process as well as polling the GPU core temperatures and the AC system power consumption (interfacing with a WattsUp Pro) to also provide per-test performance-per-Watt metrics.
Besides testing the latest Linux games like Thrones of Britannia, Total War: Warhammer II, Rise of the Tomb Raider, as well as F1 2018 for testing Steam Play. On the compute side the NVIDIA GPUs were tested with TensorFlow, OctaneBench 4.0, NAMD, Folding@Home Bench, and other GPU tests. Additional NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Linux benchmarks will be coming in the days ahead with having more time for other testing due to this article just being my 24 hour experience with this $349 graphics card.