Nouveau Drags Behind Intel & Radeon For Linux 2D Performance

The Nouveau 2D performance is atrocious compared to the Intel and Radeon open-source drivers.

Strangely the first test where Nouveau did good was with GtkPerf's GtkDrawingArea "Circles" test, where it at least beat the RadeonSI-using hardware that's limited to GLAMOR. The Intel HD Graphics 4600 with SNA also performed slowly for this test. The best GPUs handling this special case were the Radeon HD 5000/6000 series hardware that supports EXA.

While it's a mix of high and low-end GPUs, the overarching theme was that the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA 2D driver performance was horrendously slow compared to the Intel / Radeon open-source drivers. Beyond that, for several of the tests the older Radeon GPUs were running faster than the newer AMD hardware due to using EXA for 2D acceleration in place of GLAMOR. Fortunately, going forward is a lot of hope for GLAMOR due to the major work going on right now with developing it inside the X.Org Server, etc. Stay tuned for the new Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau OpenGL/3D results from Linux 3.14 + Mesa 10.2-devel Git later this week.