Checking In On Nouveau Gallium3D For Mesa 9.1

Up this holiday weekend on Phoronix are benchmarks of the open-source Nouveau Gallium3D when comparing the driver's state on the Git branches of Mesa 9.0 and Mesa 9.1-devel. While checking in on the latest Mesa Nouveau code, three NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards were benchmarked from a development snapshot of Ubuntu 13.04.

Coming up in the next week will be the initial benchmarks of the Nouveau driver stack with the Linux 3.8 development kernel compared to the other recent Linux kernel releases. Being looked at in this article is just comparing the Mesa Nouveau Gallium3D performance when building Mesa Git master (Mesa 9.1-devel git-2f225f6) and the Mesa 9.0 stable branch (Mesa 9.0.1 git-0ac9029) on 28 December. The rest of the software stack was the same, using the latest Ubuntu 13.04 development packages with the Linux 3.7 kernel, Unity 6.6 desktop, xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.4 DDX, X.Org Server 1.13.1 RC2, and GCC 4.7.2.

The graphics cards used for this Mesa 9.0 vs. 9.1-devel Nouveau benchmarking was a NVIDIA GeForce 9500GT, GeForce 9800GT, and GeForce GT 220. All of the graphics cards were running at their default video BIOS speeds due to the Nouveau re-clocking support still being flakey. Similar updated benchmarks of 9.0 vs. 9.1-devel for the Intel and Radeon Linux graphics drivers are forthcoming in early 2013.