35-Way Linux GPU Graphics Comparison, Initial NVIDIA RTX 40 SUPER Linux Benchmarks

Also new to the RTX 4070 series is the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER, which NVIDIA also sent out. This $799 USD graphics card has 8448 CUDA cores, 2.34GHz base clock. 2.61GHz boost clock, and 16GB of GDDR6X video memory on a 256-bit bus. This top-end RTX 4070 series graphics card has a 285 Watt power rating.

NVIDIA sent over the ASUS GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER that was quite interesting with its cooler layout, having a physical switch for selecting between performance and quite modes, and usual ASUS quality we've enjoyed over the past two decades.

The fourth and final new NVIDIA graphics card review sample in this batch was the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER that is going on sale today. This $999 USD graphics card has 10240 CUDA cores compared to 9728 with the RTX 4080, a 2.55GHz boost clock with the SUPER variant compared to 2.51GHz, a 2.29GHz base clock over 2.1GHz, and still having 16GB of GDDR6X video memory on a 256-bit bus. The GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER has a 320 Watt total graphics power rating, the same as the RTX 4080.

These latest NVIDIA graphics cards worked well with the packaged NVIDIA Linux driver. Initially when I started all of this fresh graphics card (re)testing earlier in January I began with the 545.29.06 driver release given that it was the latest at the time. When moving to the new SUPER graphics cards they were reported as just the "NVIDIA Device" with lacking official support. There were also performance abnormalities in some workloads but when moving to the recently-released 550.40.07 beta driver all of these new graphics cards were properly detected and performing inline with expectations. So just be aware if going for a new SUPER graphics card you'll likely want to be using the NVIDIA R550 Linux (beta) driver or whatever next point release may come out in the R545 series.

Since Linux 6.7 there is initial RTX 40 accelerated support using the NVIDIA GSP firmware but that is still in the early stages of development. Similarly, the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver is in its early stages but has been making much progress and as of a few days ago now exposes Vulkan 1.3 so that more games can work atop this open-source driver. But long story short, nearly all NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series owners will be best off using the packaged NVIDIA proprietary driver at least in the near-term. Especially if wanting to make use of ray-tracing and other features you will need to be using the official NVIDIA Linux driver. In any event at least in the longer-term there should be new possibilities for those wanting to use Nouveau + NVK but at least for now it's definitely advisable to be sticking to the NVIDIA packaged driver unless you are planning to help with Nouveau/NVK development.