15-Way Open vs. Closed Source NVIDIA/AMD Linux GPU Comparison

For those that wanted to see the AMD and NVIDIA open-source vs. closed-source driver performance side-by-side, here's the numbers. Overall, the open-source AMD performance is much better than the open-source NVIDIA driver performance. The open-source NVIDIA driver developed by the "Nouveau" project is done through clean-room reverse-engineering and as such they have large hurdles to jump when it comes to GPU re-clocking, power management, and other important functionality that Linux desktop users expect. At the same time though, the open-source AMD Linux support for the Radeon HD 7000 series is still being brought up into a suitable state one and a half years after the Southern Islands debut.

Other advantages to the open-source AMD Linux driver aside from the relatively better performance are Radeon support for UVD video decoding and numerous other features.