Nouveau NVD0-Fermi Is Still A Busted Mess

Only a few times was I lucky enough to get any OpenGL games running on the NVIDIA GeForce GT 520 with the latest code, but it ultimately went awry and there were also some OpenGL rendering problems with the latest Nouveau Gallium3D code for Fermi. Obviously though we did not make it far enough to be able to complete any new graphics benchmarks.

Sadly the open-source driver support for these latest Fermi GPUs is still a mess. Seeing as we're still a few weeks out from the Linux 3.3 kernel merge window and that Mesa 7.12/8.0 hasn't been branched from master yet, it's possible we will see the NVD0 support improve by the time these driver components are released, but we'll need to wait and see. For now if you want a discrete graphics card with reliable open-source support under Linux, you are definitely best off with a Radeon graphics card. If you insist on going with NVIDIA hardware, the GeForce 9 series through the GeForce 200 series seems to be the best supported now, but Nouveau is a game of Russian Roulette depending upon the configuration.