The Graphics Cards For Linux Gaming With The Best Value & Efficiency At Higher Resolutions

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Gaming on 21 September 2015 at 11:50 AM EDT. Page 1 of 7. 41 Comments.

Last week I published The Best, Most Efficient Graphics Cards For 1080p Linux Gamers while today are some complementary results with an assortment of NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards while running all tests at 2560 x 1440 as a more demanding scenario than last week's results.

The same selection of NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards as last week's 1080p comparison were used as well as the same set of Linux games, plus a few more due to better utilizing the GPU and being less CPU bound. Results are in this article for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Metro Last Light Redux, UE4 Elemental, UE4 Matinee, Unigine Valley, and Xonotic. Beyond the raw OpenGL performance figures, the performance-per-Watt and raw power consumption numbers are available as monitored by a USB-based WattsUp Pro power meter. The value / cost efficiency was also calculated for each of the results based on the graphics card; I used the current list prices on Amazon.com (US) for all of the graphics cards I had purchased or were retail models while the reference samples were listed at the list pricing.

On the AMD side the tested graphics cards were the Radeon R9 270X, R9 285, R9 290, R7 370, and R9 Fury. On the NVIDIA side there was the GeForce GTX 950, GTX 960, GTX 970, GTX 980, GTX 980 Ti, and GTX TITAN X. The cards tested were based upon the hardware I had available as well as being of recent, modern graphics cards that are still available for easy purchasing from Amazon or other major Internet retailers. The latest Catalyst 15.9 Linux driver was used on the AMD side while on the NVIDIA side was their new 355.11 driver.

2560x1440 Linux AMD NVIDIA Ubuntu GPUs

All benchmarks were carried out via the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.


Related Articles