35-Way NVIDIA/AMD Proprietary Linux Graphics Driver Comparison

With the Unigine Heaven benchmark, the NVIDIA performance continued to run much better than the AMD Radeon graphics cards. As noted in earlier Phoronix articles, the Radeon R9 290 OpenGL Linux performance is quite poor... The Radeon R9 290 retails for over $400 USD but with many OpenGL benchmarks the GeForce GTX 770 that sells for around $340 delivers close performance or in some workloads is even faster. To no surprise, the GeForce GTX 780 Ti was the fastest graphics card benchmarked on Linux.

The GeForce GTX 780 Ti drew an average of 326 Watts during testing with a peak of 350 Watts while the Radeon R9 290 drew an average of 314 Watts with a peak of 356 Watts.

When it comes to the performance-per-Watt, the GeForce GTX 780 Ti and GTX TITAN (GK110 GPUs) were leading and in delivering the same level of efficiency were the Maxwell-based GTX 750 and GTX 750 Ti GPUs. The Radeon Rx 200 series and HD 7950 were delivering the level of efficiency of a GT 740 and GTX 760.

The Radeon R9 290 was the hottest graphics card with an average temp of 87 Celsius and a peak of 93 Celsius. Hawaii is known to be hot.