NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960: A Great $200 GPU For Linux Gamers

Unigine Valley on this graphics card comes just under 60 FPS at 1920 x 1080.

The performance-per-Watt remains very good for the GTX 960...

The GeForce GTX 960 showed promising numbers for the OpenCL compute performance when benchmarking LuxMark.

The performance-per-Watt for this OpenCL test was also very favorable for this Maxwell GPU.

As these are just some very early preview performance numbers to share for now, you can look at the rest of the preliminary data via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file. You can see how your own system performs by installing the Phoronix Test Suite and running phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1501225-DE-GEFORCEGT58.

The numbers coming out later today include the new Unreal Engine 4 demos, both Metro Redux games on Linux, etc. While you can look at all of the results for yourself shortly (and compared to AMD Catalyst on Linux), the GeForce GTX 960 has proven to be a great mid-range graphics card for Linux gamers. The performance is great, the power efficiency is splendid as with the other Maxwell GPUs, and overall it's a very strong offering coming in at just $200 USD. There's same-day Linux support and with NVIDIA's proprietary driver you generally don't have to worry about any Linux OpenGL gaming issues that unfortunately can't be said right now for AMD Catalyst on Linux. This is an especially attractive graphics card for those just looking to upgrade their currently dated graphics card.

Stay tuned for lots of exciting benchmarks! Thanks to NVIDIA and EVGA for the GeForce GTX 960 sample for launch-day Linux testing.