A 14-Way Comparison Of NVIDIA vs. Nouveau Drivers

The last OpenGL benchmark I have that worked for both drivers was Lightsmark. Lightsmark is a relatively good OpenGL 2.1 benchmark that can stress most OpenGL paths well, but the performance tends to be troubling for most Mesa/Gallium3D drivers. This continues to be the case on Nouveau even with the latest Git code. The Nouveau frame-rate performance was generally 40 FPS or less, while the NVIDIA blob could easily push several hundred FPS on the same hardware.

Now let's look at the performance in other areas...