NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti "Maxwell": A Great Mid-Range GPU For Linux Users

Up first for our inaugural GeForce GTX 750 Ti "Maxwell" Linux benchmarking will be various OpenGL and OpenCL benchmarks from our Core i7 4770K "Haswell" Ubuntu Linux test system. For analyzing the GeForce GTX 750 Ti performance we did fresh benchmarks on a large array of AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards. The comparison GPUs included the:

- HIS AMD Radeon HD 6450 1024MB (625/667MHz)
- Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 6770 1024MB (850/1200MHz)
- Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 6870 1024MB (900/1050MHz)
- Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 6950 2048MB (800/1250MHz)
- ASUS AMD Radeon HD 7850 1024MB (860/1200MHz)
- XFX AMD Radeon HD 7950 3072MB (900/1375MHz)
- Sapphire AMD Radeon R7 260X 2048MB (1150/1650MHz)
- Sapphire AMD Radeon R9 270X 2048MB (1100/1400MHz)
- XFX AMD Radeon R9 290 4096MB (947/1250MHz)
- XFX NVIDIA GeForce GT 220 1024MB (625/400MHz)
- ECS NVIDIA GeForce GT 240 512MB (550/1700MHz)
- ECS NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 768MB (675/1800MHz)
- eVGA NVIDIA GeForce GT 520 1024MB (810/500MHz)
- eVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti 1024MB (951/2178MHz)
- MSI NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 1024MB (1084/2500MHz)
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 2048MB (705/3004MHz)
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2048MB (540/2700MHz)
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 2048MB (540/3004MHz)
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 2048MB (540/3505MHz)
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN 6144MB (575/3004MHz)
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti 3072MB (549/3500MHz)

(For the clock speed differences, ignore the minor differences against their rated speeds as it was simply what's advertised by the driver and their respective interfaces, some of which don't advertise the boost frequency values, etc.) All graphics cards were tested with their default settings and configurations. This Intel Core i7 4770K system was running Ubuntu 13.10 x86_64 with the Linux 3.12 mainline kernel. All NVIDIA graphics cards were tested with the NVIDIA 334.16 Beta while the AMD hardware was tested with its latest Catalyst 14.1 Linux Beta.

Following these OpenGL graphics and OpenCL compute results for the 21 different graphics cards, there are also power consumption, performance-per-Watt, and thermal results that follow. All of the benchmarks were done in a fully standardized and automated, reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite software. With the results hosted on our OpenBenchmarking.org cloud, it's also very easy to see how your own system compares to these numbers against the 21 graphics cards -- including the GeForce GTX 750 Ti -- by simply installing the Phoronix Test Suite and then running phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1402176-PL-NVMAXWELL44.

Let's see how well NVIDIA's first Maxwell GPU is running under Ubuntu Linux!