22-Way SteamOS Graphics Card Comparison: NVIDIA Wins Across the Board (phoronix.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A 22-way AMD Radeon vs. NVIDIA GeForce graphics card comparison on SteamOS 2.0 "Brewmaster" was carried out with one month to go until Steam Machines begin to ship. The article looks at the OpenGL performance of this Debian-based Linux distribution as well as the power/performance efficiency, thermal efficiency, and value of the entire line-up. The results make it pretty clear why the current range of Steam Machines with SteamOS all ship with NVIDIA graphics.

Comments

What else is new?

[Sycraft-fu]

AMD has never been able to write OpenGL drivers worth a damn. I dunno why they have so much trouble, but it has been that way forever. Holds true on Windows too. nVidia cards run equal speed in DX and OpenGL on Windows, AMD cards run was faster in DX mode.

Allegedly the open source drivers would fix it, however it turns out that programming graphics drivers is really hard, particularly when you can't use licensed code, and the drivers have not provided impressive features and performance yet.

So, as ever, nVidia is the winner because their proprietary Linux drivers are just as fast as their proprietary Windows drivers which is to say damn fast.

Best?

[Coren22]

So, the best price/performance comes out to a GTX 750, so why even bother with a newer card?

GTX 750 - $109
GTX 960 - $205
GTX 970 - $318

Yet, the reviewer recommends the above 960 or 970 for living room builds. Do you really get that much more performance to spend $100 and $200 more on a video card for a TV?

The 750 also runs cooler

750 - 35-54 deg C
960 - 45-74 deg C
970 - 34-63 deg C

which will allow your living room PC to run quieter. I recommend the 750, you will be happier being able to hear your games/movies over the spinning fans.

Re:Best?

[The Raven]

The 960 was only a barely behind the 750 in performance per dollar... which means you are getting nearly double the performance for that doubling in price.

Or, to put it another way, the 960 is 90% faster than the 750, for 100% more money. The 970 is 160% faster for 200% of the price. Those are actually great stats... when you normally look at high end cards, you often get 50% faster for 100% of the price.

Finally, all the games he tested were rather old (common for Linux). If I'm buying a new steam machine now, I don't want to buy one that can play three year old games for $100, I want to buy one that will play next years games.