Nouveau GeForce 400/500 Fermi On Linux 3.1

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 5 August 2011 at 01:00 AM EDT. Page 2 of 3. 11 Comments.

The Nouveau "NVC0" Gallium3D driver was outright broken for Nexuiz while it continues to work with the "NV50" driver.

OpenArena had run on the Nouveau Fermi stack, but its performance was very poor for the GeForce GTX 460. The proprietary NVIDIA driver was around fifteen times faster. The driver reported to be running at the stock (675/1800MHz) frequencies like the proprietary driver, but this may have been incorrect based upon the vast performance differences or other serious shortcomings in the open-source driver.

Regardless of the driver problem's cause, the "out of the box" Nouveau Fermi performance on the latest kernel and Mesa is quite poor. With the Warsow game, it was around a 14x difference.

Lastly, with both drivers in an "out of the box" configuration, the NVIDIA 280.04 beta driver was around 30 times faster than Nouveau Gallium3D on the Linux 3.1 kernel with the Lightsmark OpenGL benchmark. These results can be found on OpenBenchmarking.org.


Related Articles
AMD Quietly Funded A Drop-In CUDA Implementation Built On ROCm: It's Now Open-Source
Trying Out & Benchmarking The New Experimental Intel Xe Linux Graphics Driver
Intel's Open-Source Compute Runtime Performing Increasingly Well Against NVIDIA's Proprietary Linux Driver
Intel Arc Graphics See Faster Performance On Ubuntu 23.10
Raspberry Pi 5 Graphics Continue With Open-Source Driver & Crazy Fast Compared To RPi 4
Initial Benchmarks Of The "NVK" Open-Source NVIDIA Vulkan Driver