NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 On Linux: Testing With OpenGL, OpenCL, CUDA & Vulkan

If you were amazed by the GeForce GTX 1080 performance under Linux but its ~$699 USD price-tag is too much to handle, the GeForce GTX 1070 is now shipping for $399~449 USD. NVIDIA sent over a GeForce GTX 1070 and I've been putting it through its paces under Linux with a variety of OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan benchmarks along with CUDA and deep learning benchmarks. Here's the first look at the GeForce GTX 1070 performance under Ubuntu Linux.

While by now all of you in the market for a new GPU have likely seen the GTX 1070 specs and perhaps even the Windows results. But if you haven't been paying attention yet to the Pascal cards, the GTX 1070 has 1920 CUDA cores, a 1506MHz base clock with 1683MHz boost clock, 8GB of GDDR5 video memory with a 256-bit interface, GPU Boost 3.0, and other specs in common with its bigger brother, the GTX 1080. The GeForce GTX 1070 has a graphics card power draw of 150 Watts and requires a single 8-pin PCI-E power connector for operation. The maximum GPU temperature is 94°C.

NVIDIA Corp had sent over a bare Founder's Edition GeForce GTX 1070 card for our Linux testing. Since the end of last week when the GTX 1070 officially hard-launched, there have been limited quantities available via Amazon.com and NewEgg, among other Internet retailers. Most GeForce GTX 1070 cards are priced at $449 USD until more of the AIB partner cards are released in the weeks ahead.

In conjunction with the NVIDIA 367 proprietary driver on Linux, the GeForce GTX 1070 ran into no difficulties running under Ubuntu Linux throughout my initial testing. As noted in my GTX 1080 Linux review, there wasn't any overclocking support available when enabling the CoolBits options and this is a similar limitation with the GTX 1070 (yesterday NVIDIA did release a new 367 Linux driver that I have yet to test but its official change-log at least didn't make note of any overclocking additions).

Since my earlier GTX 1080 review, nothing has changed with regards to the open-source driver support. I have yet to see any experimental patches published for at least kernel mode-setting in Nouveau while any accelerated support for Pascal will not happen until NVIDIA is able to release the signed firmware binary images for usage by the Nouveau driver. I haven't received any word from NVIDIA Corp yet when that Pascal firmware availability is expected, but at least the proprietary driver support is in good shape.

But as I'm sure you're all excited to see how the GeForce GTX 1070 is performing under Linux with open-standards APIs, let's go straight to the benchmarks.