16-Way NVIDIA GeForce vs. AMD Radeon Comparison - August 2017

Last week were the benchmark results showing how the open-source Radeon Linux driver is becoming increasingly competitive with NVIDIA's driver and is very competitive OpenGL-wise with the Radeon Software Windows driver. Here are some more NVIDIA and Radeon benchmarks today under Linux with each vendor's latest drivers using sixteen different graphics cards.

Compared to last week's comparison looking at the latest Radeon performance, this is a larger GPU comparison, slightly newer Mesa Git and Linux kernel build, and the NVIDIA binary driver was now tested with the Linux 4.13 driver with it working out fine there. The NVIDIA driver in use was 384.59 while the Radeon driver stack tested was Linux 4.13 Git paired with Mesa 17.3-dev Git via the Padoka PPA built against LLVM 6.0 SVN. All tests happened on the same Core i7 7740X system running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

The Radeon GPUs tested for this comparison were the Radeon R9 285, R9 290, RX 480, RX 560, RX 580, and R9 Fury based upon the GPUs available. Coming up soon is the Radeon RX Vega launch and should be interesting to see how it performs under Linux with it looking like AMD is now supplying hardware for Linux testing of Vega. The NVIDIA cards tested were the GeForce GTX 780 Ti, GTX 960, GTX 970, GTX 980, GTX 980 Ti, GTX 1050, GTX 1060, GTX 1070, GTX 1080, and GTX 1080 Ti.

All of these OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks ran for this article were done in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.