NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980: The Best GPU For Linux Gamers

First up is Valve's newest title for Linux that was released just last week: Counter-Strike Global Offensive.

While running Counter-Strike: Global Offensive at 3840 x 2160, the performance was appearing rather CPU limited with the performance not being off from the GTX 780 Ti. Regardless, the result is still worth showing since even with the latest AMD Linux driver at the time its performance remains very poor. The GTX 980 was 33% faster than the Radeon R9 290 using Catalyst on Linux. While unfortunately I don't have a Radeon R9 290X for Linux testing due to AMD's lack of cooperation, under Windows the GTX 980 is generally 10~20% faster than the R9 290X graphics card.

Unigine Heaven was just about 6% faster with the GTX 980 than the GTX 780 Ti. The Catalyst driver used for testing failed to launch Unigine Heaven with the AMD Radeon hardware.

The GeForce GTX 980 blasts ahead the GTX 780 Ti when it comes to the OpenCL performance as measured by LuxMark... The GTX 980 on Linux with the 343.22 driver was 54% faster than the GTX 780 Ti! The GTX 980 was also 31% faster than the Radeon R9 290 Hawaii graphics card.