NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 / RTX 4090 Linux Performance
Recently we finally received the GeForce RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 graphics cards for Linux testing from NVIDIA. For those that have been eager to see how the RTX 40 series hardware performs under Linux, here are my initial Linux gaming benchmarks featuring a variety of Linux native titles as well as with Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux atop Proton + DXVK/VKD3D-Proton. The GeForce RTX 4080/4090 Linux performance is compared against a variety of other graphics cards including the new Radeon RX 7900 XTX with its open-source upstream Linux driver support.
The GeForc RTX 4080 is NVIDIA's $1199+ graphics card in the Ada Lovelace line-up. The RTX 4080 features 9,728 CUDA cores, a 2.21GHz base clock with 2.51GHz boost clock, 16GB of GDDR6X video memory, and a Total Graphics Power rating of 320 Watts.
The GeForce RTX 4080 requires a 450W or greater PCIe Gen 5 cable otherwise with the included adapter can be powered off three PCIe 8-pin cables when using a 750 Watt or greater power supply.
Meanwhile the GeForce RTX 4090 is the current top-end Ada Lovelace consumer graphics card. The GeForce RTX 4090 pricing starts out at $1,599 USD for this graphics card that features 16,384 CUDA cores, a 2.23GHz base clock with 2.52GHz boost clock, and 24GB of GDDR6X video memory.
The GeForce RTX 4090 is an absolute beast but does have a Total Graphics Power rating of 450 Watts and requires using 4x PCIe 8-pin power cables with the included adapter otherwise a 450 Watt or greater PCIe Gen 5 power cable. NVIDIA recommends a system power supply of at least 850 Watts for running the power hungry but immensely powerful GeForce RTX 4090.
The GeForce RTX 4090 is an outright massive card with a 3-slot design and measuring in at 304 x 137 mm.
As both the GeForce RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 have already been available for a number of weeks in the marketplace, you likely are already familiar with all the general details on these cards that have been covered on the many Windows review sites and other articles. So let's jump straight into the Linux overview and testing.