Nouveau With Mesa 7.9 Is Better, But Still Slow

Nexuiz is frequently left in a broken state with Mesa (at least when using the settings shipped with the Phoronix Test Suite), but here you can see that even with a GeForce 9800GTX the Nexuiz experience is barely playable with the FPS at higher resolutions being less than thirty. The NVIDIA driver was nearly five times faster than Nouveau for running this OpenGL game on Linux.

The NVIDIA driver here is four times faster than Nouveau and is fast enough to provide a sufficient gaming experience if using a modest NVIDIA graphics card.

While the Nouveau Gallium3D driver is running at just a fraction of the speed of NVIDIA's official Linux driver and is not well optimized in that a GeForce 8600GTS can outperform a GeForce 9800GTX, Nouveau in Mesa 7.9 is much more stable and featureful than past Mesa releases. This community-developed driver also continues to evolve and while we are still experiencing an occasional stability problem, by the time H1'2011 distributions are shipping we hope to see the Nouveau Gallium3D driver enabled by default on more desktop Linux distributions. The Nouveau driver can also generally handle compositing effects just fine and is a much better open-source driver option than using VESA with just software acceleration, which is NVIDIA's recommendation until installing their binary driver.