NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 On Linux: OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan Performance
$699 USD is a lot to spend on a graphics card, but damn she is a beauty. Last month NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 1080 as the current top-end Pascal card and looked great under Windows while now finally having my hands on the card the past few days I've been putting it through its paces under Ubuntu Linux with the major open APIs of OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan, and VDPAU. Not only is the raw performance of the GeForce GTX 1080 on Linux fantastic, but the performance-per-Watt improvements made my jaw drop more than a few times. Here are my initial Linux results of the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 Founder's Edition.
Pardon for being late with these Linux results due to expecting a card from NVIDIA, not receiving one, then finally this week I ended up buying the Gigabyte GV-N1080D5X-8GD-B for $699, or what came to $765 USD once factoring in shipping and taxes. Chances are if you've been thinking of spending any amount close to this on a GTX 1000 card, you are already very familiar with Pascal's architectural details and other information from the plethora of Windows gaming publications. So I'll just recap a few things before jumping straight over to the Linux side of things.
The GTX 1080 boasts 2560 CUDA cores, a base clock of 1607MHz with a boost clock of 1733MHz, 8GB of GDDR5X memory with a 256-bit interface, GPU Boost 3.0 technology, OpenGL 4.5 / DirectX 12_1 / Vulkan support, and DisplayPort 1.4 / HDMI 2.0b / dual-link DVI connectivity. The GeForce GTX 1080 has a graphics card power rating of 180 Watt and thus requires just one eight-pin power connection. The graphics card has a maximum temperature of 94°C. The GeForce GTX 1080 Founder's Edition doesn't look too different from past Maxwell and Kepler reference cards.
Included with this Gigabyte Founder's Edition GV-N1080D5X-8GD-B card was just the graphics card and Windows driver CD. Once I decided to go ahead and buy a GeForce GTX 1080 rather than playing the waiting game any longer, it took just about a day to find the GTX 1080 briefly in stock via NewEgg. As of writing this initial article a few days later, most Internet retailers still list their GTX 1080 offerings as out-of-stock but have seen inventories pop up for a few minutes at a time. Hopefully by later in June there will be more quantities of Pascal cards as well as the AIB partner cards with their custom designs and cheaper price-tags.
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