NVIDIA Linux Driver Continues Running Strong Against The GeForce Windows Driver

As usual, first up was the simplest OpenGL cross-platform game test: OpenArena

With OpenArena, all three graphics cards running Ubuntu 14.10 with the latest proprietary driver (NVIDIA 346.22) were faster than Windows 7 with its latest 347.09 release. Of course, the Nouveau (Linux 3.18 + Mesa 10.5-devel) numbers are very low given the limited re-clocking support for this open-source NVIDIA Linux driver.

Across the board with varying image quality levels for Xonotic, Ubuntu 14.10 with the NVIDIA Linux driver was faster than the NVIDIA Windows driver. The difference was very measurable for these benchmarks albeit with running 175+ FPS at 1080p, most gamers won't notice a qualitative difference in the gaming experience. The Nouveau driver stack remained slow and will likely be slow for some months ahead until re-clocking is fully sorted out -- unless NVIDIA Corp were to step up soon and make more commitments to the open-source driver.