35-Way NVIDIA/AMD Proprietary Linux Graphics Driver Comparison

The first test run was Valve's Team Fortress 2 game.

With Team Fortress 2 at 1920 x 1080 when using the proprietary AMD/NVIDIA Linux drivers with the newer GPUs the game becomes more CPU limited, but these results are still interesting. While the newer, higher-end graphics cards became CPU bottlenecked, the GeForce graphics cards were tapping out at a higher frame-rate than all of the Radeon HD graphics cards... The GeForce 700 series were getting about 180~190 FPS while the Radeon HD 6000 series and newer were tapping out around 150~160 FPS. These results are also interesting for showing how far the NVIDIA and AMD GPU designs have come over the past few generations.

The most power-hungry graphics cards were the GeForce GTX 780 Ti and AMD Radeon R9 290. The power consumption numbers come in line with expectations. Here's when the Phoronix Test Suite calculated the performance-per-Watt based upon the above data:

Delivering the highest performance-per-Watt of the 35 graphics cards tested was the Radeon R7 260X mid-range graphics card followed by the Radeon HD 7850 and then the NVIDIA Maxwell-based GeForce GTX 750 series graphics cards. Maxwell GPUs tend to run incredibly power efficient and I'm super excited to see Maxwell make it into some high-end NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.

Lastly for Team Fortress 2 are the graphics card temperatures.... The 8500GT, HD 5450, and HD 6450 were all running rather hot as they were the batch of passively-cooled graphics cards.