NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 / RTX 4090 Linux Performance

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founder's Edition graphics card easily dominated in these Linux benchmarks. The GeForce RTX 4090 performance was excellent but its physical size, high power consumption, and lofty price-tag may put it out of reach for most gamers. But if you can afford a GeForce RTX 4090 and don't mind using the proprietary Linux graphics driver stack, it's an amazingly powerful graphics card. The GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card is still a very capable graphics card to take on 4K gaming, deliver excellent ray-tracing results, and all-around a great performer. In the non-ray-traced gaming tests the GeForce RTX 4080 under Linux tended to perform quite similar to the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX.

Here is a look at the GPU power consumption metrics over the course of all the Linux game tests carried out. The GeForce RTX 4080 Founder's Edition actually came in slightly under the GeForce RTX 3080 Founder's Edition and even the RTX 4090 Founder's Edition on average did slightly better than the RTX 3090, but the peak power consumption came in 20% higher than the RTX 3090. The GeForce RTX 4090 power consumption on average was at 90% that of the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, which was a bit surprising while the peak power consumption on the RTX 4080 was higher by just 3%.

While the GeForce RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 Founder's Edition graphics cards are very large, their large heatsinks led to great thermal results across the span of all the gaming tests conducted. The RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 were the coolest graphics cards of those tested for this Linux gaming comparison while also not being too noisy in comparison to the other graphics cards.

At the end of the day the GeForce RTX 4090 and Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards were frequently trading blows under Linux depending upon the game and settings. The RX 7900 XTX to its benefit has a fully open-source driver stack while on the NVIDIA side the RTX 40 series relies on the packaged driver solution -- but with hope that Nouveau + GSP + NVK in the future will lead to a nice open-source driver option. When it comes to the GeForce RTX 4090, its performance was astounding and easily led the race and delivered terrific generational uplift over the GeForce RTX 3090. But with costing $1599 USD or more, the GeForce RTX 4090 is an expensive graphics card.

Thanks to NVIDIA for supplying these review samples for Linux testing on Phoronix. Up next on the RTX 4080/4090 Linux front is a look at the Blender performance as well as a variety of OpenCL and CUDA compute benchmarks.