NVIDIA vs. Radeon Linux 5.0 + Mesa 19.0 Drivers - 14-Way Gaming GPU Comparison
As is always the case at Phoronix ahead of any major graphics card launch, it means re-testing the collection of past graphics cards for comparison in order to have the newest data on the entire line-up with the very latest GPU drivers, operating system updates, and any game updates. For those curious what the very latest Linux gaming performance is looking like at the end of January, here are benchmarks of the NVIDIA Pascal and Turing graphics cards on their 415.27 latest driver release up against the Linux 5.0 Git kernel paired with the near-feature-frozen Mesa 19.0 built with the AMDGPU LLVM 9.0 back-end. These 14 graphics cards on the latest software stack was put through more than three dozen gaming tests.
For your viewing pleasure today is a look at the current AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce performance with the current line-up as of right now. Using the NVIDIA 415.27 driver, the GeForce GTX 1060, GTX 1070, GTX 1070 Ti, GTX 1080, GTX 1080 Ti, RTX 2060, RTX 2070, RTX 2080, RTX 2080 Ti, and TITAN RTX were benchmarked for the green side. On the AMD side was the Linux 5.0 kernel as of 27 January along with the latest Mesa 19.0-devel open-source driver state as of the same date with Padoka PPA and using the AMDGPU LLVM 9.0 SVN back-end. The Radeon cards tested today were the RX 580, RX 590, RX Vega 56, and RX Vega 64.
All of the graphics cards were tested from an Intel Core i9 9900K system with ASUS PRIME Z390-A motherboard, 16GB of RAM, and a Samsung 970 EVO 250GB NVMe SSD running Ubuntu 18.10 with the mentioned graphics driver upgrades while everything else was run at their stock settings. All of these Linux gaming benchmarks were carried out using the Phoronix Test Suite. In this article are just the very latest raw gaming performance metrics while fresh performance-per-Watt metrics and more will be on the way next week.
If you are short on time, here is a look at the harmonic mean of all the gaming benchmarks conducted and about to be presented... With the very latest Linux graphics drivers, the RX 580 remains on par with the GTX 1060 while the RX 590 is mid-way between the GTX 1060 and GTX 1070. The Radeon RX 590 is working out well these days with the very latest graphics driver stack compared to the early issues around the firmware and kernel when the RX 590 first shipped. The RX Vega 56 meanwhile is aligned with the GTX 1060 while the RX Vega 64 is aligned with the RTX 2060 and GTX 1080 for raw Linux gaming performance. If you enjoy all of these benchmarks and wish to view our multi-page comparisons on a single-page while also being ad-free (plus potentially more statistical features like this in future articles that may be exclusive to premium), consider joining Phoronix Premium to show your support. Now onwards with all of these fresh Linux gaming benchmarks.