Nouveau Driver Power Management Against The NVIDIA Blob

Now onto playing the "Big Buck Bunny" 1080p movie in MPlayer using the X-Video extension.

The average CPU usage was comparable between the two drivers and four graphics cards. Had NVIDIA's Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) used instead of X-Video, the NVIDIA binary driver would have had a dramatically lower CPU usage, but that video-decoding API isn't supported by Nouveau at this time.

Using the proprietary NVIDIA driver caused less power to be consumed by the graphics card when using X-Video full-screen compared to on the Nouveau stack.

During this video playback process, the graphics cards when being controlled by the proprietary driver had produced a lower operating temperature than the open-source KMS/DRM driver.