NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Offers Up Incredible Linux GPU Compute Performance

That's the initial look at the GPU compute performance on Ubuntu Linux with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080. Now here are some high-level metrics:

When looking at the GPU power consumption during the entire span of testing, on average the RTX 3080 had a board power consumption of 166 Watts with a peak of 321 Watts, that was the highest of any of the graphics cards tested going back to the Maxwell GTX 900 series. Though depending upon the particular benchmark, the performance-per-Watt when looking at the benchmark results against the per-test power metrics, the RTX 3080 tended to fall in-line with the power efficiency of the previous-generation RTX Turing graphics cards or just behind it and closer to Pascal. The RTX 3080 no doubt consumes more power, but at least in the workloads that are able to effectively make use of the GPU it does deliver decent power efficiency.

Even with consuming the most power, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 cooler did perform well and was in line with prior graphics cards. Through all of these GPU compute tests the average core temperature was 57 degrees with a peak of 72 degrees, which is better than the original RTX 2080 as well as having much better thermal efficiency than older cards like the GTX TITAN X and GTX 980 series.

If taking the geometric mean of all the NVIDIA GPU compute tests carried out for this article that were ran on all of the GPUs under test, the GeForce RTX 3080 at stock speeds is 27% faster than the GeForce TITAN RTX, which costs significantly more than the $699 RTX 3080. Compared to the RTX 2080 SUPER, the RTX 3080 provided 63% uplift in the compute tests or 73% compared to the original GeForce RTX 2080. Compared to the GTX 1080 Pascal, the RTX 3080 delivered 2.67x the performance and 4x the performance of the GeForce GTX 980 Maxwell.

As long as you don't mind using the NVIDIA proprietary drivers on Linux, the GeForce RTX 3080 offers incredible GPU compute performance as shown across the many different workloads benchmarked for this article. Stay tuned for the Linux gaming benchmarks and additional figures in the days ahead when having more time with the RTX 3080. Hopefully we will also be able to deliver some NVIDIA RTX 3090 Linux performance numbers in the not too distant future.