Benchmarks Of NVIDIA's New Linux GPU Driver

For seeing whether NVIDIA's new 319.12 Beta Linux graphics driver that introduces many new features has any impact on the OpenGL performance for many common Linux games, here are some Phoronix test results when comparing the NVIDIA 304.xx, 310.xx, 313.xx, and 319.xx graphics driver series on GeForce GTX 550 Ti "Fermi" and GeForce GTX 680 "Kepler" graphics cards.

After the debut this week of the NVIDIA 319.12 Beta for Linux that brought RandR 1.4 features, Optimus-like capabilities, and many other improvements throughout the company's proprietary Linux graphics driver, benchmarks were conducted. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti and GeForce GTX 680 graphics cards were each tested with the 304.88, 310.44, 313.30, and 319.12 binary Linux graphics drivers from Ubuntu 13.04.

An assortment of test profiles were used from OpenBenchmarking.org by the fully-automated and open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking framework. Results in full for this testing can be found on OpenBenchmarking.org within the 1304101-UT-NVIDIA31994 result file.



On OpenBenchmarking.org are the results in full along with system logs, more specific hardware/software details, and much more data. Embedded below is just a sampling of the NVIDIA Linux OpenGL results.

Going from the NVIDIA 304.xx to 310.xx series there is the previously-talked about NVIDIA Linux OpenGL performance optimizations. However, for this new 319.xx series, for our common Linux OpenGL benchmarks, there isn't too much to look at.

The 319.12 Beta might even be slightly slower...

The new Unigine Valley benchmark was also slower on this new beta driver release.

View more on OpenBenchmarking.org. A thorough multi-page Phoronix article on the matter will come when there's a stable 319.xx graphics driver release and additional time for complete testing.