NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 On Linux

Lastly, we looked at a few other metrics recorded by the Phoronix Test Suite when we re-ran the Unigine Heaven test at 2560 x 1600. However, due to the Radeon HD 5000 series graphics cards not working well with Unigine Heaven on the latest Catalyst driver release, their results are not available. The GPU die temperatures are logged by the Phoronix Test Suite every second using the NV-CONTROL extension for the NVIDIA driver and the OverDrive extension with the ATI driver.

While the ATI Radeon HD 4890 was the fastest graphics card that was tested in Unigine Heaven, its die temperature was also the highest. The average die temperature for the Radeon HD 4890 was 73°C while the GeForce 9800GTX was at 65°C and the GeForce GTX 460 was cooler at 59°C. Prior to running the tests, the GeForce GTX 460 also idled more cool at around 42°C while the two other graphics cards were much higher.

Another change the Phoronix Test Suite noticed when running this system monitoring test was the CPU usage for the Radeon HD 4890 with the Catalyst 10.7 driver was lower than that of the NVIDIA graphics cards and their binary driver for a majority of the time, but it was by just a couple percent. While the OverDrive extension also allows monitoring of the GPU load as a percentage, there is no such feature of the NVIDIA Linux driver at this time so we are unable to compare the GPU load between the competing hardware.