Testing 60+ Intel/AMD/NVIDIA GPUs On Linux With Open-Source Drivers

With the Intel "Haswell" HD Graphics 4400 and HD Graphics 4600 testing, there were no major problems to note.

Having noted all the open-soure AMD and NVIDIA (Nouveau) issues on the previous pages, of the 65 graphics cards that I originally set out to test, the reduced list of working graphics cards to properly complete the Linux OpenGL benchmarking came down to:

Core i3 4130 - HD Graphics 4400
Core i7 4770K - HD Graphics 4600
FirePro V3800
FirePro V4800
FirePro V4900
FirePro V5800
FirePro V5900
FirePro V7800
FirePro V7900
FirePro V8700
FirePro V8750
FirePro V8800
Radeon X800XL
Radeon X1800XL
Radeon X1800XT
Radeon HD 3850
Radeon HD 4550
Radeon HD 4650
Radeon HD 4670
Radeon HD 4770
Radeon HD 4830
Radeon HD 4850
Radeon HD 4870
Radeon HD 4890
Radeon HD 5450
Radeon HD 5770
Radeon HD 5830
Radeon HD 6450
Radeon HD 6570
Radeon HD 6770
Radeon HD 6870
Radeon HD 6950
Radeon HD 7850
Radeon HD 7950
Radeon R7 260X
Radeon R9 270X
GeForce 8600GT
GeForce 9500GT
GeForce 9600GSO
GeForce 9800GT
GeForce 9800GTX
GeForce GT 220
GeForce GTX 460
GeForce GT 520
GeForce GTX 550 Ti
GeForce GTX 650
GeForce GTX 680
GeForce GTX 760
GeForce GTX 770
GeForce GTX TITAN

These 50 graphics cards were able to run on the Linux 3.15 kernel and Mesa 10.3-devel and at least finish a majority of the OpenGL benchmarks.

The OpenGL benchmarks used were tests known to run well on the open-source Mesa/Gallium3D drivers, could run on a majority of the GPUs targeted, and could be fully-automated via the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org to meet our standards for reproducability and automated testing.

As said at the start of the article, in follow-up articles will also be results from 2D Linux desktop testing, OpenGL testing when also analyzing the power consumption and performance-per-Watt, and the GPU thermal performance. The proprietary AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards will also be tested with their range of supported hardware.

To reiterate, all of these graphics cards were tested from a system with an Intel Core i7 4770K Haswell CPU on a Gigabyte Z97-HD3 motherboard with 16GB of RAM and a 120GB Samsung 840 Series SSD. On the software side was Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64-bit with the Unity 7.2 desktop, X.Org Server 1.15.1, GCC 4.8.2, and the default EXT4 file-system. For this comparison to deliver the very latest open-source graphics driver code, the system was upgraded to the Linux 3.15 kernel and Mesa 10.3.0-devel. The latest X.Org drivers were loaded that included xf86-video-ati 7.3.99 Git, xf86-video-intel 2.99.911, and xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.10.

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