This week NVIDIA introduced
the 346 Linux driver beta with a huge amount of changes and new features -- from
GPU over-volting to NVENC and VP8 support. Curiosity got the best of me so I've now ran some GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980 Linux benchmarks to see if the performance of these new, high-end Maxwell GPUs have changed at all with this latest proprietary driver release.
I ran some quick tests comparing the NVIDIA 346.16 Beta driver to the current stable driver, NVIDIA 343.22, using the GTX 970 and GTX 980 graphics cards. Testing happened on Ubuntu 14.10 64-bit.
All tests were done with the open-source
Phoronix Test Suite software.
This is just a quick, one-page article as the results aren't particularly interesting. With the Core i7 5960X these new Maxwell GPUs were also a bit CPU bottlenecked at 2560 x 1600, but still the main thing to point out is no real change in performance found. Of course, tests on other Linux systems is still ongoing at Phoronix.
Furmark was one of the rare workloads where the performance did change with the new NVIDIA 346.16 Beta: the performance improved by a bit for both GeForce GTX 900 series graphics cards.
Find
all of the benchmarks at OpenBenchmarking.org.
