NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 Offers Great Linux Performance

The tested graphics cards for this Linux review of the GTX 970 include:

- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 2048MB (1006/3004MHz)
- eVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 1024MB (1019/2505MHz)
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2048MB (1019/2700MHz)
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 2048MB (980/3004MHz)
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 2048MB (1045/3505MHz)
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti 3072MB (875/3500MHz)
- eVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4096MB (1163/3505MHz)
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 4096MB (1126/3505MHz)
- ASUS AMD Radeon HD 7850 1024MB
- Sapphire AMD Radeon R7 260X 2048MB
- Gigabyte AMD Radeon R9 270X 2048MB
- XFX AMD Radeon R9 285 2048MB (918/1375MHz)
- XFX AMD Radeon R9 290 4096MB

The NVIDIA 343.22 Linux driver was used for all the GeForce GPU tests while the Catalyst OpenGL 4.3.13083 / fglrx 14.30.4 binary driver was used for all the AMD GPU tests. This AMD driver is different from what was used in the GTX 980 review due to now including the Radeon R9 285 on Linux and currently being bound to using this older driver for our AMD tests to maintain the same driver across the board but the Tonga GPU not being supported by the fglrx 14.40 branched driver.

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with the Linux 3.15 64-bit kernel on the Intel Core i7 5960X Haswell-E platform was still used as the main test rig for benchmarking this assortment of modern AMD/NVIDIA GPUs under Linux with many OpenGL and OpenCL compute benchmarks run via the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.