NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 / RTX 4090 Linux Performance

First up was the game HITMAN 3 running on Linux thanks to Valve's Steam Play. The Radeon RX 7900 XTX on its Linux 6.2 + Mesa 23.1-devel driver stack was successfully running in between the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 graphics cards, quite competitively against the NVIDIA RTX 40 series cards on their proprietary driver stack. Going from the GeForce RTX 3090 to RTX 4090 on Linux with the HITMAN 3 game at 4K boosted the performance by 74% generationally.

On a performance-per-dollar basis, the AMD Radeon pricing was more competitive but at least the RTX 40 series was comparable to the RTX 30 series in value.

The GeForce RTX 4090 during HITMAN 3 was consuming just about 3% higher power use on average than the RTX 3090 but the peak power draw was up by 13% generationally. The GeForce RTX 4090 power use was 24% higher than the Radeon RX 7900 XTX on Linux. The GeForce RTX 4090 power draw was actually lower than the RTX 3080 while running HITMAN 3.

While the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 are physically big graphics cards, their large heatsinks actually led to the lowest GPU operating temperatures and similar to the Radeon RX 6750 XT thermal performance while running HITMAN 3.

When running Cyberpunk 2077 on Linux via steam Play the Radeon RX 7900 XTX surprisingly was a few frames ahead of the RTX 4090 graphics card... It was a great showing out of the Radeon RX 7900 XTX now that the early RDNA3 Linux driver issues have been worked out.

But when stressing the graphics cards by running Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K with ultra quality image settings, the GeForce RTX 4090 easily lept ahead while the RTX 4080 was delivering around 8% better performance than the RX 7900 XTX in this demanding but popular game. From the GeForce RTX 3090 to RTX 4090 was a 39% generational improvement.