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.
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.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.