NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970/980: Windows vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance

Earlier this week I posted some benchmarks showing NVIDIA's Linux Driver Continues Running Strong Against The Windows Driver that also included the open-source Nouveau driver results in the mix too. However, due to using the Nouveau driver, the newest GeForce GTX 970/980 graphics cards were left out of testing as the open-source driver doesn't yet fully support these newer Maxwell GPUs. In this article though we're going back to compare the Windows vs. Linux performance of these two high-end NVIDIA GPUs at a UHD 4K resolution too.

This comparison is similar to the three-way NVIDIA GeForce graphics card comparison from Monday but just testing the Maxwell-based GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980 graphics cards while running the latest binary drivers on Windows and Linux. As with the other end-of-2014 Windows vs. Linux benchmarks, Windows 7 Pro x64 with all available system updates was used and on the Linux side was Ubuntu 14.10. The latest NVIDIA Linux driver is the 346.22 driver version while the latest Windows version at the time of testing was the 347.09 driver release.

Each operating system was up-to-date and tested with its default settings. The same Intel Core i7 4790K Haswell system was used for both the Linux and Windows testing. The Seiki 39-inch 3840 x 2160 display was used for testing to run many of the OpenGL benchmarks at 4K for fully stressing these latest NVIDIA graphics cards.

All of the OpenGL benchmarks in this article were run via the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.