NVIDIA vs. Nouveau Drivers With Linux 3.18 + Mesa 10.4-devel

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 21 November 2014 at 09:56 AM EST. Page 1 of 3. 17 Comments.

As a continuation of the Is The Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Fast Enough For Steam On Linux Gaming? article from earlier this week, here's the results of the latest NVIDIA Linux proprietary graphics driver compared to the Linux 3.18 + Mesa 10.4-devel graphics driver stack when running two of Valve's most popular Steam on Linux gamers.

Using the same seven graphics cards on the same system as the Nouveau results from earlier this week, I added in the data points when using the new NVIDIA 346.16 Beta Linux graphics driver. On the Xubuntu 14.10 x86_64 installation the NVIDIA 346.16 graphics driver was running great with the GPUs under test: the GeForce GTX 460, GTX 550 Ti, GTX 650, GTX 680, GTX 760, GTX 770, and GTX 780 Ti.

Nouveau vs. NVIDIA Valve Steam On Linux Gaming

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Team Fortress 2 were the two Valve Linux games tested for this open-source vs. closed-source driver comparison. The benchmarks were facilitated via the Phoronix Test Suite along with the result monitoring and CPU usage / GPU temperature / AC system power consumption polling.


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