Nouveau Re-Clocking Is Way Faster, Shows Much Progress For Open-Source NVIDIA

Right off the bat when running OpenArena as one of the simplest OpenGL Linux games, the performance improvements due to re-clocking were very apparent... Up to now Nouveau has been stuck to running at the clock frequencies programmed by the video BIOS at boot time for Kepler graphics cards. Now with the GeForce 600/700 hardware tested, we could see that even increasing the frequencies part-way (the "0a" performance state that was generally fairly high for the core frequencies but not maxed for the video memory frequency), the frame-rates were more than doubled quite often. With the GTX 650 that could re-clock all the way to its highest performance state without troubles, the frame-rate quadrupled in using this feature of the Linux 3.16 kernel.

While the frame-rates are much higher yet, they're not at their peak until all of the graphics cards can hit the highest state and run without any screen corruption or stability issues. Regardless, this initial static re-clocking support for Nouveau in Linux 3.16 is a huge milestone.

Further making this a developer-only-focused feature for now is that there isn't dynamic fan management for Nouveau with Kepler GPUs when re-clocking... Once toying with the performance states, the graphics cards immediately jump to 100% fan speed and can be extremely noisy for the higher-end graphics cards.