The NVIDIA/AMD Cards On Linux With The Best Value For 2015 Holiday Shopping

If you are wanting to buy an AMD Radeon or NVIDIA GeForce graphics card this holiday season, here is a fresh round-up of thirteen different graphics cards using the latest AMD/NVIDIA drivers. Beyond just running several Linux OpenGL game tests -- including some Steam tests -- these results also have the performance-per-dollar benchmark results computed too for finding the best value for 1080p Linux gaming this season.

This past week I took all of the graphics cards I have available and where they still are available new for purchase on Amazon.com and tested them with Catalyst 15.9 for Linux and the NVIDIA 358.16 binary driver release. To avoid overloading with too many data points, the 13 graphics cards were tested in Xonotic, the OpenArena classic, Unigine Valley, Metro 2033 Redux, and Metro Last Light Redux. Unfortunately for some of the other Steam Linux games we benchmark, the latest runtime updates have once again broken compatibility.

On the AMD side the cards I have in my possession and where they still can be purchased new on Amazon include the Radeon R9 Fury, R7 370, R9 285, and R9 290. On the NVIDIA side there's many more comparison points since NVIDIA Corp continues to kindly supply Phoronix with plenty of review samples for Linux testing. The NVIDIA cards I had available meeting the same requirements were the GT 740 SC and the GTX 750 Ti, GTX 760, GTX 950, GTX 960, GTX 970, GTX 980, GTX 980 Ti, and GTX TITAN X. It's the complete Maxwell line-up currently promoted by NVIDIA as well as the Kepler GT 740 and GTX 760 that can still be found available for purchase on Amazon.

All of the tests were done at 1080p considering it remains the most common resolution among Linux gamers. If you are after a graphics card for 4K / Ultra HD gaming, see the recent 4K AMD/NVIDIA High-End GPU Comparison On SteamOS Linux.

The pricing information was gathered this weekend on Amazon. The performance-per-dollar results can be added to any Phoronix Test Suite result file using our open-source performance-per-dollar module that is auto-loaded via the COST_PERF_PER_DOLLAR= environment variable.

Hopefully you will find all of these fresh data points useful if you are looking to buy a new Radeon or GeForce graphics card this holiday season. Let's go check out the numbers.