A Fresh Look At The Nouveau Gallium3D Performance

The Urban Terror game with the latest Nouveau driver code runs at 65% the speed of the NVIDIA blob for this GeForce 9 series GPU.

With the VDrift racing game, the Nouveau driver is faster than the NVIDIA blob, but that is to be found with most Mesa drivers and there are also some rendering differences when using these open-source drivers.

With Lightsmark, there is a moderate drop in performance when upgrading to the latest Linux 3.0 kernel Nouveau DRM. The open-source driver is also still no match for NVIDIA's official binary-only driver.

Unfortunately, the Linux 3.0 kernel does not bring any major Nouveau driver advancements, but at least it has not dramatically regressed. We are in the process of running some more tests for other generations of NVIDIA hardware.