All of the tests happened from an Intel Xeon E3-1280 v5 Skylake system with MSI C236A Workstation motherboard with 16GB of RAM, 120GB Samsung 850 EVO SSD, and running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Ubuntu 16.04 has the Linux 4.4 kernel, Unity 7.4 desktop, and X.Org Server 1.18.3 as the key components during graphics testing. With my tested Fermi hardware and newer was the NVIDIA 364.19 driver as the latest currently available driver for Linux users/gamers. For the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX testing I had to use the NVIDIA 340.96 driver as it was the last release stream supporting the GeForce 9 series.

With the sixteen graphics cards, first up I ran a variety of Linux OpenGL tests at 1080p in order to provide comparable results to the GPUs going back to the 9800 GTX. Following the 1920 x 1080 results, on the newer (Kepler and Maxwell) graphics cards I conducted 4K benchmarks for these higher-end graphics cards capable of playing Linux games at 3840 x 2160. I also did run some OpenCL compute benchmarks in a similar manner, which will be saved for a follow-up article on Phoronix.

During all of the graphics card testing, the AC system power consumption was monitored using a WattsUp Pro power meter that's automatically polled via our open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. In addition to monitoring the power usage on a per-test basis, the Phoronix Test Suite was also logging the reported GPU temperature as well as calculating the performance-per-Watt for each of the benchmarks.