NVIDIA RTX PRO Blackwell Performance Delivering Excellent Linux Performance
The graphics cards tested for this workstation-minded Linux comparison included:
- NVIDIA RTX 2000 Ada
- NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada
- NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada
- NVIDIA RTX PRO 2000 Blackwell
- NVIDIA RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell
- NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell
- NVIDIA RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell
- NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell
- Intel Arc Pro B50
- Intel Arc B580
- Intel Arc Pro B70
- AMD Radeon PRO W7600
- AMD Radeon PRO W7700
- AMD Radeon PRO W7900
- AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700
This was based on the relevant graphics cards I had available and in the case of the consumer Arc B580 using that for lack of ever having received an Arc Pro B60 review sample.
👁 NVIDIA RTX PRO graphics cards
For all of the NVIDIA RTX (PRO) graphics cards tested they were running on the NVIDIA 595.58.03 official graphics driver stack. The Intel Arc (Pro) graphics cards were running on the upstream Linux 7.0 kernel with the Mesa 26.0 graphics drivers and Compute Runtime 26.14.37833.4. With the AMD Radeon (PRO) graphics cards was the upstream Linux 7.0 kernel, Mesa 26.0, and ROCm 7.4.2.
👁 NVIDIA RTX PRO graphics card
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS was running on this AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9980X workstation used for all of the testing with its stock Linux 7.0 kernel, GCC 15.2, and other components.
While testing out these new NVIDIA RTX PRO Blackwell workstation graphics cards on Ubuntu Linux, no troubles were encountered at all across the range of workloads tested -- both graphics/visualizations, AI, and other GPU compute workloads. In conjunction with the NVIDIA R595 driver with its open-source DKMS kernel driver, all of the tested NVIDIA RTX PRO Blackwell graphics cards were working great.
Let's get going with our first look at the NVIDIA RTX PRO Blackwell Linux graphics performance comparison as well as also looking at the GPU power consumption and performance-per-Watt.