NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti Steams Ahead On Linux

Now time to look at the thermal performance and power consumption of the graphics cards for a few tests. All of this was done automatically, including the generating of performance-per-Watt results. The Phoronix Test Suite was automatically reading the system AC power consumption using an USB-based WattsUp power meter and the GPU core temperatures were read with the Phoronix Test Suite through NVIDIA's binary driver. For those PTS users wanting to run similar tests, it's just a matter of setting the MONITOR=sys.power,gpu.temp PERFORMANCE_PER_WATT=1 environment variables.

The first test we have is of Unigine Valley at 2560 x 1600.

The GeForce GTX 780 Ti had an average temperature of 80 Celsius during testing. While the graphics card is warm, it's powerful and not running into any thermal issues limiting its performance like the R9 290, which was near-constantly above 90 Celsius. The GeForce GTX TITAN had a similar operating temperature to the GTX 780 Ti -- as did the GTX 770 as the coolers on these Kepler graphics cards aren't too different.

The system power consumption on average for the GTX 780 Ti on the overclocked Core i7 4770K system was 351 Watts. The GeForce GTX 780 Ti was burning through more power than the R9 290 with an average of 280 Watts. The GTX 780 Ti power consumption also exceeded that of the GTX TITAN. However, let's see how it looks when determining the performance-per-Watt:

First, the actual Unigine Valley results...

While the power consumption was the highest for the GeForce GTX 780 Ti, its performance-per-Watt was tied with the GeForce GTX TITAN on average for delivering the best results. The GeForce GTX 770, 790 Ti, and TITAN all delivered performance-per-Watt averages that noticeably exceeded all of the tested AMD Radeon hardware.