Nouveau Fermi Performance On Ubuntu 13.10

Written by Michael Larabel in Nouveau on 12 July 2013 at 07:49 PM EDT. 16 Comments
NOUVEAU
As the latest for our early Ubuntu 13.10 Linux performance benchmarks, here's a brief comparison of the Nouveau Gallium3D vs. NVIDIA binary graphics driver performance from a NVIDIA GeForce "Fermi" graphics processor.

This article is just to provide some initial reference of performance expectations for Nouveau on modern NVIDIA "Fermi" GPUs with the upcoming 13.10 release. Ubuntu 13.10 still has yet to pull in Mesa 9.2 and it will also be switching over to using Mir/XMir for the desktop, but for where things stand today, we have some new benchmarks at Phoronix. Ubuntu 13.10 may also still pull in the Linux 3.11 kernel. More thorough benchmarks from a diverse range of hardware will come once all these changes have settled.

The benchmarks today happened from the ASRock Vision 3D NetTop with Intel Core i3 370M CPU and NVIDIA GeForce GT 425M graphics. The Nouveau driver still lacks Fermi/Kepler re-clocking support (even with the latest Linux 3.11 kernel code) so the GT 425M is still handicapped to its boot frequencies of 202/324MHz rather than 560/800MHz.

Full system details and the benchmark results in full can be found on OpenBenchmarking.org within 1307116-SO-ASROCKVIS42.
ASRock Vision 3D Graphics Ubuntu 13.10
The Nouveau driver also only supports OpenGL 3.1 at this time rather than OpenGL 4.3 as exposed by the proprietary driver.
ASRock Vision 3D Graphics Ubuntu 13.10
ASRock Vision 3D Graphics Ubuntu 13.10
ASRock Vision 3D Graphics Ubuntu 13.10
Obviously with the clock speed problems, which won't be resolved until at least the Linux 3.12 kernel but there's yet to be any Fermi GeForce 400/500 re-clocking code to emerge, the open-source Nouveau driver's "out of the box" performance will continue to suffer.
ASRock Vision 3D Graphics Ubuntu 13.10

See the rest of the results here.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week