Last week with Phoronix turning ten years old I celebrated by testing 65 different GPUs with the open-source Linux graphics drivers from Intel, AMD, and Nouveau. I also followed-up with power efficiency and thermal benchmarks from all of the graphics cards that played nicely on the latest open-source drivers. Today I'm following up with the next round of testing by checking out the proprietary NVIDIA and AMD Catalyst graphics drivers under Linux with 35 different graphics cards.

After carrying out all of the PCI Express graphics cards at my disposal for last week's open-source tests, I then immediately turned to testing all of the supported GPUs by the proprietary AMD and NVIDIA graphics drivers. Today's comparison is still large (35 graphics cards) but smaller than the earlier comparison because the latest mainline drivers don't support the diverse selection of Radeon and GeForce GPUs going back as many years as the open-source drivers. NVIDIA does maintain multiple legacy drivers that work well with updated Linux distributions, but for the Radeon HD 4000 series and older hardware, AMD doesn't really maintain their legacy Catalyst Linux driver for new Linux kernel and X.Org Server releases. As a result, just the latest mainline AMD Catalyst and NVIDIA driver releases were testing, which gives us support for the GeForce 8 series and newer and on the AMD side is the Radeon HD 5000 series and newer.