NVIDIA VDPAU Performance Metrics On Ubuntu 14.04 Linux

The reported NVIDIA GPU utilization varied quite a bit. The GPU struggling the most with the 1080p H.264 video decoding was the GeForce GT 520 where it took around 30% GPU usage while most of the graphics cards averaged below 20%.

When looking at the overall system power consumption for this Intel Core i3 4130 Haswell system, the GTX 750 series hardware were the most power efficient and then the slow GT 520 Fermi graphics card.

Overall, from these quick performance metrics obtained while running the 1080p version of Big Buck Bunny using the Phoronix Test Suite, if I had to immediately recommend a graphics card for accelerated Linux video playback for a Linux HTPC / multimedia PC, my recommendation would easily be the GeForce GTX 750 or GeForce GTX 750 Ti. The power efficiency of these NVIDIA Maxwell GPUs are great, they have more than enough performance potential for video playback and other modest OpenGL tasks, no external PCI-E power connection is required, they operated very quietly and cool, these new GPUs boast the latest VDPAU / PureVideo HD feature sets, and overall the Maxwell hardware is extremely promising and works great when using the proprietary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver.