NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 / RTX 4090 Linux Performance

While at first it wasn't clear if/what Linux limitations there were for the GeForce RTX 40 series considering the waiting game on review samples, it's turned out to work well under Linux when using the current production R525 series. Using the NVIDIA 525.89.02 Linux driver for the initial testing was working out fine and on-par with prior generations of GeForce RTX/GTX graphics cards.

Both the GeForce RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 have been behaving well under Linux with the R525 proprietary graphics driver stack across OpenGL and Vulkan workloads without encountering any stability issues or other problems. So it's been smooth sailing thus far for this Linux game testing as well as also getting started on some CUDA/OpenCL/OptiX benchmarks for a follow-up article in the next week or two on Phoronix.

Of course, if you are after open-source Linux driver support akin to the Radeon experience, you'll still be waiting a while... NVIDIA has their Open GPU Kernel Driver code that they distribute via GitHub in tandem with their updated proprietary driver releases, but that code remains outside of the Linux kernel source tree and currently not on a trajectory for upstreaming.

Meanwhile with the upstream Novueau DRM/KMS driver, that's still in poor shape for recent NVIDIA GPUs. Only with Linux 6.2 is there now Nouveau support for the GeForce RTX 30 series with 3D hardware acceleration when using the latest Mesa Git code... But for the RTX 30 support the performance on open-source is very low due to being limited to the boot clock speeds. There also is no proper Vulkan driver support yet but NVK continues to be worked on for NVIDIA open-source Vulkan support moving forward but that is still dependent upon forthcoming kernel driver improvements and other work before it will be ready for gamers -- plus contingent on the kernel driver being able to re-clock the graphics card for good performance.

To address the sore spots with Nouveau, the developers involved continue working on being able to make use of the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) that should simplify their driver enablement work and ideally take care of their power management / re-clocking woes. The open-source NVIDIA kernel driver code maintained by the company also leverages the GSP found on the RTX 20 series and later. Once that Nouveau GSP support is sorted out and upstreamed it will hopefully improve the situation for the open-source mainline Linux driver support, but that at least is still months away.

Long story short, for the near-term if using GeForce RTX 40 series hardware on Linux it really only makes sense using NVIDIA's packaged driver.

For today's GeForce RTX 4080/4090 Linux gaming tests I compared the performance to other cards I had available including the RTX 3090, RTX 3080 Ti, RTX 3080, RTX 3070 Ti, RTX 3070, TITAN RTX, RTX 2080 Ti, and RTX 2080 graphics cards. All of these cards were tested on Ubuntu 22.10 with the NVIDIA 525.89.02 driver. On the AMD side with Linux 6.2 + Mesa 23.1-devel was the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, RX 6800 XT, RX 6800, RX 6750 XT, and RX 6700 XT. The Radeon RX 7900 XT was left out this round due to a recent driver regression (or hardware problem, still being analyzed) leading to some performance oddities there.

All of this testing happened on an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X desktop system running Ubuntu 22.10 with Linux 6.2.