NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Linux Gaming Performance

After last week exploring the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Linux GPU compute performance for this Ampere graphics card along with the Blender 2.90 performance, today is a look at the Linux gaming performance for the RTX 3080 both for native games as well as those Windows games running on Linux via Steam Play (Proton).

In the week since receiving the GeForce RTX 3080, the Linux performance has been very captivating not only for the CUDA/OptiX/OpenCL benchmarks across dozens of workloads outlined last week but also for the Vulkan gaming performance on Linux with native game ports and the growing number of Windows games running on Linux via Valve's Proton with DXVK for converting Direct3D calls to Vulkan.

As with Windows, you really need to be gaming at 4K (or higher) to enjoy the speed of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series. Thus the benchmarks today are looking primarily at 4K performance but also at lower resolutions in some cases for those curious...

The testing was done with an AMD Ryzen 9 3950X system running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 / RTX 2080 SUPER / RTX 2080 Ti / TITAN RTX / RTX 3080 were all tested with the NVIDIA 455.23.05 Linux driver. On the AMD side were the Radeon RX 5700 XT and Radeon VII graphics cards running off the Linux 5.9 kernel AMDGPU driver and Mesa 20.3-devel via the Oibaf PPA. That is for the main set of results in this article while the second half of the article is looking at the performance in less extreme areas and thus a larger selection of graphics cards under test.

With all of these Linux gaming benchmarks besides the raw performance was also having the Phoronix Test Suite monitor the GPU power consumption and GPU core temperatures on a per-test basis. Performance-per-dollar metrics are also provided. Let's see how the GeForce RTX 3080 at $699 USD does for Linux gaming.