Ahead of the upcoming NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 series graphics “Blackwell” and the AMD Radeon RX 9070 series “RDNA4” later in the quarter, I figured it would be worthwhile having a dedicated article looking at the latest upstream Linux graphics/gaming performance for current generation NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 and AMD Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards. On the AMD side was the near-final Linux 6.13 kernel along with Mesa 25.0-devel for the latest RADV Vulkan and RadeonSI OpenGL driver support while on the NVIDIA side was their current 565 driver release branch.
Today’s article is offering a fresh look at the higher-end NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 and AMD Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards. With just days to go until the GeForce RTX 5090 series availability, this article was focused on the more higher-end current generation wares. On the NVIDIA side I re-tested the GeForce RTX 4070, RTX 4070 SUPER, RTX 4070 Ti SUPER, RTX 4080, RTX 4080 SUPER, and RTX 4090. On the AMD side was the Radeon RX 7800 XT, RX 7900 GRE, RX 7900 XT, and RX 7900 XTX graphics cards.
The NVIDIA 575.77 packaged driver with its open kernel modules provided the latest official Linux drivr support as of testing time. On the AMD side was Linux 6.13 Git with Mesa 25.0-devel Git as of testing time. All tests were done on the same Intel Core Ultra 9 285K Arrow Lake desktop this round.
From there a variety of different benchmark friendly Linux gaming/graphics tests were used for this fresh look at the current GeForce and Radeon graphics cards on the newest available Linux drivers. The GPU power consumption was also monitored for those interested in the power efficiency perspective.
