Nouveau Driver Still Tries To Compete With NVIDIA

When running Nexuiz at 1920 x 1080, the 8600GTS was surprisingly at 87% the speed of the NVIDIA binary driver while the 9500GT was at 97% the speed. The GeForce GT 220 was even one frame per second faster. This is similar to the Radeon Gallium3D vs. AMD Catalyst results from last week where for Nexuiz and Xonotic (the games using the DarkPlaces engine) the results were surprisingly good for the Mesa/Gallium3D drivers and appeared to the human eye to render the same.

OpenArena 0.8.8 ran well for the lower-end cards on the Nouveau driver, but the cards where re-clocking failed and for the higher-end GPUs, the binary blob is still far superior.