NVIDIA GeForce GT 740 On Linux: I'd Rather Have Maxwell

To no surprise given that the GeForce GT 740 is a Kepler-based graphics card and NVIDIA's first-rate Linux support commitment using their proprietary driver, the GT 740 had no problems running flawlessly once loading the new NVIDIA 337.25 Linux driver release. The EVGA GeForce GT 740 was running without any apparent bugs or other issues when using the NVIDIA 337.25 Linux graphics driver.

For those wondering about the power/performance levels of the EVGA GeForce GT 740 Super Clocked card, there's three levels exposed with the base level having a 324MHz graphics core clock and 648MHz GDDR5 video memory clock speed. The second performance level is with a 540MHz core frequency and 1620MHz for the video memory. Lastly, the highest performing state will have the GPU frequency run between 551MHz and 1084MHz and the video memory at a static 5000MHz.

To see how well the GeForce GT 740 is running under Ubuntu Linux, I compared the GT 740 performance to the following Fermi, Kepler, and Maxwell graphics cards: GeForce GT 520, GTX 550 Ti, GT 610, GTX 650, GTX 750, GTX 750 Ti, and GTX 760. On the AMD side were the following Radeon graphics cards: HD 6450, HD 6570, HD 6770, R7 260X, and R9 270X. The NVIDIA 337.25 driver and Catalyst 14.6 Beta were used on Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit from the Core i7 4770K test system. All of this OpenGL benchmarking was done using the Phoronix Test Suite software.

Besides showing the raw OpenGL performance, the system power consumption was monitored using a WattsUp USB power meter, the performance-per-Watt was rendered by the Phoronix Test Suite, and the GPU temperatures were also automatically monitored.