NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980: The Best GPU For Linux Gamers

When loading up the NVIDIA 343.22 driver that was released earlier this month, the GeForce GTX 980 fired up right away and was working fine on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. This driver also supports the GeForce GTX 970.

All standard functionality should be in place... In my tests over the past week I didn't run into any stability issues or other problems with the NVIDIA 343.22 Linux driver handling the GTX 980.

The standard anti-aliasing and aniostropic filtering settings remain present. No new AA modes are advertised under Linux for this new Maxwell card nor Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR) as the new GTX 970/980 feature. Multi-Pixel Programmable Sampling (MFAA) is the new form of anti-aliasing offered under Windows with this hardware.

MPEG1, MPEG2, H.264, VC1, MPEG4, DIVX4, and DIVX5 remain the advertised codecs by VDPAU with the NVIDIA 343.22 driver for the GTX 980. Hopefully the H.265 support will be added soon and sadly there's no VP8/VP9 hardware support.

The GTX 980 was idling about 40C in the open-air test bed. More thermal results will come later in this article.

All of the performance states should work fully with the proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver -- unlike Nouveau's current shortcomings.