Complementing the recent Linux GPU benchmarks of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 and GeForce RTX 5090 looking at both the Linux / Steam Play gaming performance as well as GPU compute and other areas, in today’s testing is a wide multi-generation look seeing how the NVIDIA GeForce performance has evolved going back to the GeForce GTX 980 Maxwell GPUs up through the newest GeForce RTX 5080/5090 graphics cards.
Today’s testing is a big historical look at how far NVIDIA GPU compute performance has come since the GeForce GTX 980 “Maxwell” days up through the brand new GeForce RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 “Blackwell” graphics cards. The GeForce GTX 900 Maxwell generation was the cut-off just as the oldest GPUs supported by the NVIDIA 550.144.03 legacy driver with Kepler being unsupported there. The GeForce GTX 900/1000 GPUs had to be tested using the NVIDIA 550.144.03 Linux driver while the GeForce RTX 2000 series and newer worked with the latest NVIDIA 570.86.16 Linux graphics driver release. All of these grpahics cards were freshly re-tested for this GPU compute comparison.
All of the x80, x90, and Titan graphics cards of each generation going back from Maxwell through Blackwell were (re)tested for this article on the same Intel Arrow Lake Linux desktop. A few GPUs were missing based upon what I had readily available with the list of freshly tested GPUs including the:
– NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980
– NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti
– NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN X
– NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080
– NVIDIA GeForce TITAN RTX
– NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080
– NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER
– NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti
– NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080
– NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti
– NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090
– NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080
– NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER
– NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090
– NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080
– NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090
For this Maxwell to Blackwell benchmarking, GPU compute performance was the sole focus of the testing… No gaming since it’s simply rather inadequate to accurately compare the performance given that most demanding games for the RTX 5080/5090 would be unable to run on the GTX 980 4GB graphics card and other older games simply being CPU bound on modern hardware, etc. At least with a mix of GPU compute and rendering workloads is a bit more of a realistic and representative look at how the NVIDIA GPU performance under Linux has evolved.
In addition to looking at the raw GPU performance, the GPU power consumption was also monitored on each graphics card for each benchmark in looking at the generational power efficiency too.
All of this testing was carried out on the same system while using Ubuntu 24.10 with the Linux 6.11 kernel.
