NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 Offers Great Performance On Linux

Today's the day that we can finally publish NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 benchmarks! Today the GTX 1060 begins shipping as NVIDIA's $249 Pascal graphics card to take the Radeon RX 480 head-on. Here are all of the Linux benchmarks you've been waiting to see for the GTX 1060 under Vulkan, OpenGL, OpenCL, and CUDA. compared to various other AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce GPUs on Ubuntu Linux.

In case you missed the GeForce GTX 1060 preview, the GTX 1060 has 1280 CUDA cores, 1.7GHz boost clock frequency, and 6GB of GDDR5 video memory.

The GTX 1060 has a 120 Watt TDP and thus requires just a single 6-pin PCI-E power connector. The card has DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.0b, and dual-link DVI display connections. Like the higher-end Pascal GPUs launched so far, the GeForce GTX 1060 should be a very nice upgrade compared to the GeForce GTX 960 and older Maxwell/Kepler graphics cards.

I've been pounding the GeForce GTX 1060 under Linux the past few weeks and the experience has been great. Similar to my GeForce GTX 1070 and GeForce GTX 1080 Linux testing, if you are using the latest proprietary NVIDIA driver the experience is top-notch. As with all my Linux Pascal coverage, the proprietary driver stack is working out well and delivering top-notch performance.

For my GTX 1060 testing I was using the 367.27 driver that's been available for a few weeks. The only driver issue encountered is that the GTX 1060 isn't formally recognized, but NVIDIA is said to be releasing a new driver today that will add the formal product string for the GeForce GTX 1060.

All of the Linux graphics benchmarks on the following page were carried out in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. Among the graphics cards used for comparing performance of the GTX 1060 included the GeForce GTX 950, GTX 960, GTX 970, GTX 980, GTX 980 Ti, GTX 1070, and GTX 1080 on the green side. On the red side was the R9 285, R7 370, R9 Fury, and RX 480. The results include the raw performance, performance-per-Watt, and performance-per-dollar numbers obtained using our open-source benchmarking software.