A Fresh Look At The NVIDIA vs. Radeon Linux Performance & Perf-Per-Watt For August 2018

With NVIDIA expected to announce the Turing-based GeForce RTX 2080 series today as part of their Gamescom press conference, here is a fresh look at the current NVIDIA Linux OpenGL/Vulkan performance with several Pascal graphics cards compared to AMD Polaris and Vega offerings. Additionally, with these latest Linux drivers, the current look at the performance-per-Watt.

It will be interesting to learn more about the GeForce RTX 2080 series in a short time, which will surely deliver significantly better performance and power efficiency improvements over the GeForce GTX 1000 "Pascal" hardware. But for a current look at how those cards are running under Linux, this morning are benchmarks for the GeForce GTX 1060, GTX 1070 Ti, GTX 1080, and GTX 1080 Ti while using the latest NVIDIA 396.51 graphics driver. For the competition on the AMD side was the Radeon RX Vega 64 and RX 580 (the GTX 1060 / RX 580 included in this article for a more mature look at the Linux driver support, namely for the AMDGPU+RADV/RadeonSI side). The Radeon tests were done with the latest Linux 4.18 AMDGPU DRM state and using Mesa 18.3-dev from the Oibaf PPA as of 19 August.

During the OpenGL and Vulkan game benchmarking process, the AC system power consumption was also recorded by the Phoronix Test Suite which was interfacing with a WattsUp Pro power meter to obtain the real-time AC power consumption during the benchmarking process. Of course, more interesting tests will hopefully be coming in the next few weeks when presumably getting our hands on the GeForce RTX 2080 series. We'd anticipate same-day support under Linux for the new Turing GPUs as we have generally seen from NVIDIA over the past decade. Anyhow, enjoy these fresh results for today's graphics hardware.