The NVIDIA/AMD Cards On Linux With The Best Value For 2015 Holiday Shopping

Lastly is a composite look at the performance-per-dollar values when averaging all of the Linux gaming test results in this article.

The bottom-end Maxwell, the GTX 750 Ti, delivered the best performance for $99 albeit I wouldn't recommend it for running all of the latest AAA Linux games as the frame-rates could dip too low. The GeForce GTX 760 also scored well as this Kepler card can still be found for purchase, but it's on its last leg. Next up was the GeForce GTX 950 that's one of my preferred cards for 1080p gaming. For the higher-end GeForce GTX 900 graphics cards, there isn't much value unless future-proofing your system or are gaming at 1440p or 4K. Again, if you are interested in 4K Linux graphics card results, see my recent 4K Linux comparison.

Of the AMD cards in my possession, the MSI Radeon R7 370 was the clear front-runner, albeit it still had problems handling games like Metro Last Light Redux.

If I were to buy a graphics card for a Linux gaming system this holiday season, I would personally go for the selection of GeForce GTX 950 cards that can be found for as little as $149 while the results in this article were based on a $184 model. If you have more money to spend and are looking for your Linux gaming system to last longer, the GeForce GTX 960 cards are in the $200 ballpark (or less if going for a 2GB model rather than 4GB. If wanting to spend more than $300 on a graphics card, there is the GeForce GTX 970 where you still can find some models in a mini-ITX form factor to fit inside a SFF PC / living room PC for a quiet and compact gaming series.

If you are after 4K Linux gaming, there's where the GeForce GTX 980 series shine and deliver great value. Unfortunately, AMD's proprietary Linux driver still struggles there too.

These holiday 2015 GPU recommendations are for the proprietary drivers. While I didn't cover the open-source results in this article today, if you want a gaming graphics card strictly for using the open-source mainline graphics drivers, my recommendation would go with the Radeon R9 290 or Radeon R9 390 series. The R7 370 series does deliver good open-source value too, but with the open-source driver being slower than Catalyst / Radeon Software, there's more potential in the log-run out of the R9 290/390 for open-source use.

For those planning to buy a new graphics card this holiday season or any other PC components, please use our Amazon.com affiliate link when making your purchases as it also goes to support the site (there's also the Amazon link on the right column of all Phoronix pages). Additionally, today is the last day to take advantage of our Black Friday Premium deal that also goes to support our Linux hardware testing operations and for more interesting comparisons to come in the future.