Re-Testing NVIDIA's Threaded OpenGL Optimizations For Linux Gaming
With Counter-Strike: Source the GeForce GTX 760 saw no change in performance when taking advantage of __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS.
Running OpenArena is one of the Linux games that actually shows a large performance drop by enabling the threaded optimizations.
Besides the frame-rate being halved, the frame latency timing spiked more frequently than when using the driver in its stock configuration.
The CPU usage was higher with __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS set while delivering slower performance. The average CPU usage was 8% with OpenArena by default or 15% with the worker thread.
The GPU utilization by default averaged to 75% but dropped to 39% when enabling the threaded optimizations.
Valve's Portal game was one of the workloads where a small (6%) performance improvement was found by enabling this NVIDIA-specific environment variable.