The NVIDIA/AMD Linux GPU Gaming Benchmarks & Performance-Per-Dollar For July 2018

In part with GPU demand by crypto-currency miners waning a bit, NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics card availability at retailers has been improving in recent weeks as well as seeing less inflated prices than just recently had been the case. Given the better availability and stabilizing prices, here is a fresh look of the current line-up of GeForce and Radeon graphics cards under Ubuntu Linux using the newest AMD/NVIDIA drivers and also providing performance-per-dollar metrics given current retail prices.

The graphics cards tested for this comparison based upon what I had available and is available new through current retail channels, the tested GPUs included:

- GeForce GTX 1050
- GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
- GeForce GTX 1060
- GeForce GTX 1070
- GeForce GTX 1070 Ti
- GeForce GTX 1080
- GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
- Radeon RX 550
- Radeon RX 560
- Radeon RX 580
- Radeon RX Vega 56
- Radeon RX Vega 64

Tests were done at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K but obviously with the lower-end components I didn't bother attempting to push them to the very end. The retail prices used were obtained from NewEgg.com where the hardware could be found in-stock as of 10 July or with the NVIDIA GeForce Founder's Edition cards tested with not having them currently on NewEgg were referenced from the GeForce Store where they are currently in-stock.

All the testing was done from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS x86_64. The AMD Radeon stack used for testing was Linux 4.17.5 with Mesa 18.1.3 built against AMDGPU LLVM 6.0 via the Pkppa archive. The NVIDIA driver was the latest public build, 396.24.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite a wide range of graphics cards were tested while also using the latest pricing levels to automatically generate the accompanying performance-per-dollar graphs.