Nouveau vs. NVIDIA GeForce Linux Performance At The End Of 2014

While the performance of the Nouveau driver still leaves a lot to be desired until the re-clocking situation is sorted out, at least this community-based driver is moving in the right direction. In 2014 Nouveau started seeing greater support out of NVIDIA in the form of tiny bits of documentation, answers to pressing technical questions, and code contributions as it pertains to the GK20A Kepler GPU of the Tegra K1 SoC. The Nouveau support also progressed with features like DisplayPort audio support, OpenGL 3.3 and various OpenGL 4 extensions, initial mode-setting support for the GeForce GTX 970/980, DRI3 + PRESENT support, GLAMOR support, performance counter advancements, re-clocking improvements for older NVIDIA GPUs, fan management improvements, and various other features on both the Nouveau Gallium3D and Nouveau DRM kernel sides.

So while the performance of Nouveau might not be desirable to Linux gamers, for light desktop users and other tasks, Nouveau is beginning to catch up and yield results. Hopefully in 2015 we'll see even more great things out of the Nouveau driver camp for freeing up the NVIDIA Linux graphics support.

Updated NVIDIA Linux vs. Windows results are coming out soon; if you missed it there's already out tests of the NVIDIA proprietary driver releases from 2014. Again, if you appreciate all of the Linux benchmarking done daily at Phoronix, consider joining premium or taking other steps to help support the site.