34-Way Graphics Card Comparison On Ubuntu 17.10

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 3 November 2017 at 10:00 AM EDT. Page 1 of 4. 19 Comments.

As part of marking AMD's open-source driver strategy starting 10 years ago, among other articles, over the past week I posted an 18-way Radeon graphics card comparison on Ubuntu 17.10 while upgrading to the latest drivers. Taking those numbers further and putting them into more perspective, here is now a brief 34-way comparison with the NVIDIA GeForce counterparts added in.

On the Radeon side was the Radeon HD 4000 cards through Radeon RX Vega while testing with the Linux 4.14 kernel and Mesa 17.4-dev + LLVM 6.0 SVN stack (acquired via the Padoka PPA, the kernel from the Ubuntu Mainline PPA). It's an interesting selection of old and new hardware mostly out of curiosity for how the current open-source driver stack is performing. Unlike with the closed-source Catalyst / Radeon Software driver being in a legacy mode, the older Radeon cards thanks to the open-source driver model still see new updates and run out-of-the-box with the newest Mesa / Linux kernel.

With this article, new is the NVIDIA results, which were tested when using the 387.22 official driver on Ubuntu 17.10 from this same system. With the 387 series driver, there is support from Fermi through Pascal, and thus I tested a range of available cards from the GeForce GTX 460 through the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.

The 34 graphics cards in this round-about included the:

- GeForce GTX 460
- GeForce GTX 650
- GeForce GTX 680
- GeForce GTX 750
- GeForce GTX 760
- GeForce GTX 780 Ti
- GeForce GTX 950
- GeForce GTX 960
- GeForce GTX 980
- GeForce GTX 980 Ti
- GeForce GTX 1050
- GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
- GeForce GTX 1060
- GeForce GTX 1070
- GeForce GTX 1080
- GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
- Radeon HD 4650
- Radeon HD 4670
- Radeon HD 4770
- Radeon HD 4850
- Radeon HD 4870
- Radeon HD 6870
- Radeon HD 6950
- Radeon HD 7950
- Radeon R9 270X
- Radeon R9 285
- Radeon R7 370
- Radeon RX 480
- Radeon RX 550
- Radeon RX 560
- Radeon RX 580
- Radeon R9 Fury
- Radeon RX Vega 56
- Radeon RX Vega 64

With this wide range of graphics cards tested and the older models having small video memory capacities by today's standards and restricted OpenGL support, the range of the comparison was limited to a few 1080p OpenGL tests that could still show scaling up through the newer hardware but still work on these vintage GPUs.

Ubuntu 17.10 AMD Radeon vs. NVIDIA GeForce GPU Comparison

All of these tests were carried out using the Phoronix Test Suite.


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