NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti: Simply The Best For Linux Gamers

Given that the GeForce GTX 980 Ti launched in late May and you've probably seen some Windows results and other general information already, plus that this GTX 980 Ti has been used in other Phoronix articles/reviews in the past few weeks since receiving this review sample, this review by itself is shorter than normal. However, that's in part because from a Linux perspective it's short and easy to say the OpenGL performance is awesome. From my extensive testing over the past few weeks, the OpenGL performance is top-notch while if you're into using OpenCL for GPU compute rather than CUDA, that's the only area that really isn't a mile ahead of AMD right now on Linux.

Throughout all of my GTX 980 Ti testing the past few weeks, the NVIDIA 353 and 355 Beta Linux drivers have been running out great and I've run into no issues around the proprietary drivers supporting this latest Maxwell GPU.

Some of the GTX 980 Ti Linux tests I've done with the GTX 980 Ti already included:

- A 15-way AMD/NVIDIA 4K graphics card comparison... Aside from the GTX TITAN X running the same in some tests, the GTX 980 Ti offered the best 4K Linux gaming performance. The AMD Catalyst OpenGL performance doesn't come close to matching that of the GTX 980 Ti or even other mid to high-end NVIDIA GPUs.

- The AMD vs. NVIDIA OpenCL results, which is the lone area where NVIDIA doesn't run laps around AMD Catalyst on Linux in performance terms. Of course, if you're using NVIDIA's proprietary CUDA API you could have much better performance, but hopefully NVIDIA will work to improve their OpenCL support more going into the future.

- Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor was just released for Linux two weeks ago. Benchmarks of Shadow of Mordor on Linux show good results for NVIDIA while under AMD Catalyst the performance was slow and the R9 Fury ran into rendering issues with this latest public driver.

- My AMD Radeon R9 Fury Linux review. Again, short of the OpenCL tests, all of the Linux gaming / OpenGL tests were a sweep for NVIDIA. In many tests due to the poor state of Catalyst for Linux the R9 Fury performance was competing with NVIDIA's older Kepler hardware. Here are some of those benchmark results from that review: