Testing Out The Major Nouveau libdrm Rewrite

There also were not any changes to note with Xonotic in regards to the libdrm changes dramatically affecting the game.

Throughout all of the tests, on average the Intel Core i7 + NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M notebook was consuming 13% more power when on the NVIDIA 295.40 binary driver over the Nouveau Git code, but this driver's OpenGL performance was also multiple times faster.

From the quick testing that was carried out, the libdrm driver did not have a huge impact on the overall performance or CPU usage for the range of tests that were carried out. Regardless, internally the libdrm re-write is a big change for the Nouveau developers and does make the driver more efficient and still is reported to yield improvements for some GPUs / workloads according to the developers. The results in this article comparing the Nouveau driver to the NVIDIA blob also remain interesting in their own right.