30-Way Graphics Card Comparison On Ubuntu Linux 14.04 LTS
After this week already seeing how the open-source graphics drivers supplied by Ubuntu 14.04 LTS allow Radeon Gallium3D to run at ~80% of the Catalyst Linux driver and how open-source graphics still struggle with older hardware, our latest testing of the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS development version that will be released next month leads us to benchmarking 30 different AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards under this popular desktop Linux distribution.
A few weeks ago I delivered a 13-way AMD GPU R600/RadeonSI graphics comparison using Ubuntu 14.04 in its development state at the time and there's been numerous other open-source GPU driver tests from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, plus more are on the way leading up to the "Trusty Tahr" release next month. With it having been a while since doing much binary driver benchmarking on Linux aside from the recent GeForce GTX 750 and GeForce GTX 750 Ti Linux reviews, in this article we are benchmarking the AMD Catalyst and NVIDIA binary drivers on Ubuntu Linux.
For this testing the NVIDIA 334.21 driver was used for the GeForce hardware and on the Catalyst side the driver was tagged version fglrx 13.35.5 / OpenGL 4.3.12780. The graphics cards tested for this article were limited to the hardware I had available and was compatible with these latest NVIDIA / AMD binary driver releases... There's much more hardware I have available from NVIDIA that they supply compared to AMD for the past few generations, but I'll bring it up at GDC this month. Anyhow, the graphics cards I had from recent generations that I could benchmark on these binary drivers included:
- AMD Radeon HD 5830 1024MB
- HIS AMD Radeon HD 6450 1024MB
- Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 6770 1024MB
- Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 6870 1024MB
- Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 6950 2048MB
- ASUS AMD Radeon HD 7850 1024MB
- XFX AMD Radeon HD 7950 3072MB
- Sapphire AMD Radeon R7 260X 2048MB
- Sapphire AMD Radeon R9 270X 2048MB
- XFX AMD Radeon R9 290 4096MB
- Gigabyte NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT 256MB
- ASUS NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT 256MB
- ECS NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 256MB
- ASUS NVIDIA GeForce 9500 GT 1024MB
- XFX NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB
- MSI NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT 512MB
- NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX 512MB
- XFX NVIDIA GeForce GT 220 1024MB
- ASUS NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 768MB
- eVGA NVIDIA GeForce GT 520 1024MB
- eVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti 1024MB
- Zotac NVIDIA GeForce GT 610 1024MB
- MSI NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 1024MB
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 2048MB
- eVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 1024MB
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2048MB
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 2048MB
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 2048MB
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti 3072MB
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN 6144MB