Linux 2.6.38 To Linux 3.2 Nouveau DRM Benchmarks

World of Padman and Urban Terror were the same as VDrift as showing performance boosts for the Linux 2.6.39 and 3.1 kernels, but not for the current Linux 3.2 development cycle for this particular GPU being tested.

OpenArena also sees some boosts, but no change for Linux 3.2. The Linux 2.6.39 Nouveau performance improvements come because of KMS page-flipping support by default, plus there was also Z-compression and other work merged during that 2.6.39 window. In the Linux 3.1 kernel, the Nouveau driver had various changes, including better "out of the box" Fermi support for the latest-generation hardware.