NVIDIA Wins Over AMD For Linux Gaming Ultra HD 4K Performance

As it's been a while since last delivering any "4K" resolution OpenGL benchmarks at Phoronix, out today -- now that we're done with our massive 60+ GPU open-source testing and 35-way proprietary driver comparison -- are benchmarks of several NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards when running an assortment of Linux games and other OpenGL tests at the 4K resolution.

For those that have missed the previous installments of our Linux 4K graphics testing, there's been such benchmarks on Phoronix since last year when doing tests with a Seiki 39-inch SE39UY04. Other 4K monitors are starting to come down in price, but this Seiki UHD TV remains among the cheapest 3840 x 2160 displays available. Our most recent Linux 4K graphics card testing was back in March.

With today's tests, we're trying out several new graphics cards while testing the 4K Linux graphics performance. The latest proprietary drivers at the time of testing were used and they were the Catalyst 14.6 Beta and NVIDIA 337.25 Linux driver. The graphics cards tested were:

MSI NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 1024MB (1084/2500MHz)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 2048MB (1006/3004MHz)
eVGA NVIDIA GeForce GT 740 1024MB (1084/2500MHz)
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)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN 6144MB (836/3004MHz)
ASUS AMD Radeon HD 7850 1024MB (860/1200MHz)
XFX AMD Radeon HD 7950 3072MB (900/1375MHz)
Sapphire AMD Radeon R7 260X 2048MB (1150/1650MHz)
Gigabyte AMD Radeon R9 270X 2048MB (1100/1400MHz)
XFX AMD Radeon R9 290 4096MB (947/1250MHz)

The selection of graphics cards were limited to those that were within my possession and were 4K capable. All of these monitors were able to display at 4K either via their onboard HDMI connections or using a DVI-to-HDMI adapter with the Seiki SE39UY04. All testing was from an Intel Core i7 Haswell system running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS x86_64 with the Linux 3.13 Trusty Tahr kernel.

All benchmarking with the assortment of native Linux games and OpenGL tech demos were run via the Phoronix Test Suite.