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With Steam Machines set to begin shipping next month and SteamOS beginning to interest more gamers as an alternative to Windows for building a living room gaming PC, in this article I've carried out a twenty-two graphics card comparison with various NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon GPUs while testing them on the Debian Linux-based SteamOS 2.0 "Brewmaster" operating system using a variety of Steam Linux games.

As it's been almost two years since running some SteamOS graphics benchmarks, it's certainly past due for running a new comparison with SteamOS in much better shape now for public appeal. I did a fresh install of SteamOS 2.0 Brewmaster on a test system (Core i7 5960X, Gigabyte X99, 16GB DDR4 RAM, 240GB OCZ SSD) and then proceeded to load the Phoronix Test Suite on it through the GNOME 3.14 based desktop environment that's hidden behind the default Big Picture Mode.

When pulling in some extra packages from the Debian Wheezy repository, it was possible to get the Phoronix Test Suite running fine on Brewmaster for offering automated benchmarks. In addition to looking at the raw performance results, the Phoronix Test Suite was simultaneously monitoring the GPU's core temperature as well (exposed via the respective driver interfaces) as the overall AC system power draw (via a USB-based WattsUp Power meter). With the power information, the overall system power consumption was recorded for each system + graphics card as well as the factored performance-per-Watt. As another metric, there's also performance-per-dollar benchmark results for the graphics cards tested that you can still easily purchase new; the prices used were obtained from Amazon.com in the US for the particular graphics card model tested and for the reference graphics cards tested their MSRP was used.

...

The NVIDIA graphics cards tested for this SteamOS comparison included many new and old GPUs. There's every current Maxwell GPU model, several Kepler GPUs, and even some older Fermi cards for those curious how their old systems will work on SteamOS with these Linux games.
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 768MB
- eVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti 1024MB
- Zotac NVIDIA GeForce GT 610 1024MB
- MSI NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 1024MB
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 2048MB
- eVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 1024MB
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2048MB
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 2048MB
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti 3072MB
- eVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950 2048MB
- eVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 2048MB
- eVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4096MB
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 4096MB
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6144MB
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN X 12288MB

...

So for the AMD side I was just left:
- Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 6570 512MB
- Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 6870 1024MB
- Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 6950 2048MB
- XFX AMD Radeon HD 7950 3072MB
- XFX AMD Radeon R9 285 2048MB
- XFX AMD Radeon R9 290 4096MB
- Sapphire AMD Radeon R9 Fury 4096MB