NVIDIA vs. Nouveau Drivers With Linux 3.18 + Mesa 10.4-devel

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was playable with the higher-end GeForce 600/700 Kepler GPUs when using Nouveau at 1920 x 1080, but now with the latest binary NVIDIA driver results present, there's much greater perspective about the results. When using the NVIDIA 346.16 proprietary driver, the CPU became the bottleneck for these high-end GPUs when running the Source Engine game at 1080p. The Kepler GPUs that could only be partially re-clocked were running at about half the speed of the proprietary NVIDIA driver. Meanwhile for the older Fermi GPUs where there is no re-clocking support, the 346.16 binary blob was multiple times faster.

The CPU usage was slightly higher during this time than the Nouveau driver.

The GPU temperatures are higher to no surprise with the proprietary driver given that all of the graphics cards were pushed to their highest performance state when running Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.