Nouveau For Open-Source NVIDIA In Mesa 8.0 Is Mixed

OpenArena at 800 x 600...

The World of Padman results were close to that of the OpenArena game at 1920 x 1080 (both games are based on the ioquake3 engine) with the GeForce 8600GTS under Nouveau running faster than the NVIDIA binary driver.

At least for the GeForce 8/9 series and Fermi there does not appear to be any performance improvements when going from Mesa 7.11 to Mesa 8.0 with Nouveau Gallium3D. It is too bad the other generations of hardware were being problematic under Nouveau to conduct more thorough testing.

While not attributed to Mesa 8.0, the GeForce 8600GTS results were perhaps the most interesting numbers in this article. In some tests the Nouveau driver when handling the 8600GTS graphics card was being fairly competitive to the NVIDIA binary driver, albeit the OpenGL workload is what works with Mesa / Gallium3D and not like the latest Unigine Engine. However, the GeForce 8 performance under Nouveau will be examined more closely in an upcoming article. If you have not already, for now you can read A 14-Way Comparison Of NVIDIA vs. Nouveau Drivers from November.