NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 950 Is A $150+ Bargain For Linux Gamers

For anyone that's read past NVIDIA launch-day Linux reviews on Phoronix, it should come as no surprise that there is already support for the GeForce GTX 950 within NVIDIA's binary Linux driver. For all of my testing the past few days I used the current NVIDIA 355.06 beta public driver.

I ran into no NVIDIA Linux driver issues to speak of with the 355.06 release, besides the card just being reported as a "Graphics Device" rather than "GeForce GTX 950." Of course, NVIDIA will surely have out a new Linux driver update soon where they add in the product string.

In testing the EVGA GeForce GTX 950 on Ubuntu Linux with this driver release I encountered no stability issues or other problems. EVGA does produce some special software for monitoring and tweaking the graphics card under Windows, but at this time produces no Linux software -- then again, I haven't seen any Linux software spun out by any NVIDIA AIB partners.

While the proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver works great for the GeForce GTX 950, unfortunately not much can be said about the open-source driver support... There is kernel mode-setting support for the GeForce GTX 900 series, but that's about it. No hardware acceleration is provided by the open-source Nouveau driver for these new GPUs since the developers are stuck waiting on NVIDIA to provide the signed firmware/microcode images. Even when the hardware acceleration does come, there will still be the issue of no re-clocking support for modern NVIDIA GPUs on Nouveau. Long story short, don't buy any GeForce GTX 900 series GPU expecting to use anything but the proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver in the near-term.