NVIDIA GeForce 400 "Fermi" Series On Nouveau

VDrift continues to be interesting for the open-source drivers, but even for NVC0 the official binary driver continues churning out more frames per second.

The Nouveau developers can be applauded for reverse-engineering and bringing up NVIDIA GeForce 400 "Fermi" support -- with Gallium3D OpenGL acceleration -- less than a year after the first graphics cards were launched, but this support is clearly not ready for end-users yet. Besides the matter of needing to extract the firmware yourself from the NVIDIA binary driver as a temporary hurdle, the OpenGL performance is very poor compared to the proprietary driver and even the Nouveau Gallium3D drivers for previous generations of graphics processors. The system had also crashed a few times and there were some OpenGL rendering problems as noted.

It is unfortunate that NVIDIA Corp has not yet decided to develop an open-source strategy and/or stand behind the Nouveau driver to provide support in kind, but at least the Nouveau developers are making progress. Hopefully by year's end the Nouveau NVC0/Fermi outlook will be more positive with a pleasurable "out of the box" experience, which would put it around the Linux 2.6.41/2.6.42 kernel and Mesa 7.12.

As this testing was done with the Phoronix Test Suite these results can be further analyzed on OpenBenchmarking.org in the 1103289-GR-NOUVEAUFE13 and 1103285-GR-1103280GR56 result files. The GeForce GTX 485M results will be out in the coming days, along with CPU usage results, but these figures are not anymore promising for Nouveau.