16-Way OpenCL Compute Comparison Of The Latest Polaris & Pascal GPUs

Written by Michael Larabel in Graphics Cards on 19 August 2016 at 11:00 AM EDT. Page 1 of 6. 12 Comments.

After running many OpenGL and Vulkan NVIDIA vs. AMD Linux benchmarks earlier this week, here is a 16-way graphics card comparison when testing the AMD Radeon "Polaris" and NVIDIA GeForce "Pascal" GPUs, among others, on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and looking squarely at the OpenCL compute performance. Many OpenCL tests plus performance-per-Watt metrics too when using the latest NVIDIA proprietary Linux driver and AMDGPU-PRO.

The tested AMD Radeon hardware that's supported by the AMDGPU-PRO driver and I had available included the Radeon R7 260X, R9 285, R9 290, RX 460, RX 470 (Sapphire Nitro+ factory-overclocked), and RX 480. The latest AMDGPU-PRO driver release was tested with the Radeon hardware.

On the NVIDIA side was the GeForce GTX 950, GTX 960, GTX 970, GTX 980, GTX 980 Ti, GTX TITAN X (Maxwell), GTX 1060, GTX 1070, and GTX 1080. The NVIDIA 367.35 Linux proprietary driver was used for testing these Maxwell and Pascal GPUs.

AMD NVIDIA Linux GPU OpenCL Compute

Unfortunately I have no access to any modern Quadro/Tesla/FirePro GPUs for doing any Linux testing on that front. The same Intel Xeon E3-1280 v5 Skylake system with Ubuntu 16.04 and the Linux 4.4 kernel was used for this round of OpenCL benchmarking.

Via the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software, MixBench, FinanceBench, LuxMark, SHOC, JuliaGPU, and MandelbulbGPU were used as the OpenCL test subjects for this article.


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