NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 Offers Great Linux Performance

Next up is a look at the GPU's thermal performance and power consumption/efficiency. The GPU temperatures were read by the Phoronix Test Suite using the exposed data from their Linux drivers. The overall AC system power consumption was measured using a WattsUp Pro USB-based power meter. The Phoronix Test Suite also takes care of automatically generating the performance-per-Watt data and other tasks.

When running Unigine Valley at 1920 x 1080, the GTX 970 on the Haswell-E system was consuming an average of 230 Watts with a peak of 250 Watts -- the average power use was similar to the GTX 980 but it peaked at 260 Watts. The Radeon R9 290 meanwhile had an average of 288 Watts and peak of 331 Watts.

When determining the performance-per-Watt, the GTX 970 and GTX 980 easily do the best! Maxwell is a big upgrade over Kepler so the older NVIDIA GPUs don't come close to offering the level of efficiency as the new GM204 graphics processors while AMD doesn't yet have anything close either -- even with the R9 285 Tonga.