The Power Consumption & Efficiency Of Open-Source Linux GPU Drivers

Here's the raw performance numbers for the tested hardware with Warsow... Of course, Nouveau running very slow due to the (temporary) lack of re-clocking on generations aside from the GeForce 600/700 Kepler series and even there the re-clocking for most cards won't allow you to achieve the top clocks, as detailed yesterday. The top performer for Warsow was the Radeon HD 6870 graphics card on the mature R600 Gallium3D driver compared to the cards on the newer RadeonSI Gallium3D code.

Consuming the most power in the Warsow test was the HD 6950 followed by the HD 6870 and then the HD 7950 and R9 270X. The NVIDIA cards all consumed minimal power since most of them were locked to their lower performance/power states.

When it works out to the performance-per-Watt, the NVIDIA hardware with Nouveau on Linux 3.16 + Mesa 10.3-devel was on par with the open-source Radeon code, but again locked to their lower performance states for proportional performance to their power draw. The Intel HD Graphics performance-per-Watt for Haswell wasn't actually that good compared to the newer discrete GPUs.

With supporting full re-clocking, the GPU temperatures for the AMD hardware were the highest.