NVIDIA Linux 2009 Year In Review

We began our 2009 NVIDIA Linux driver testing with the video-cpu-usage test profile for 1080p H.264 video playback performance monitoring. While VDPAU is certainly the best video decoding/acceleration method to use with MPlayer and NVIDIA hardware, we were not able to directly compare the VDPAU performance directly due to API changes in both MPlayer and then VDPAU in the NVIDIA Linux driver. Without being able to directly compare things, we did a simple X-Video comparison. The NVIDIA 195.22 beta driver had the lowest overall CPU usage after the 185.18.14 and 190.42 drivers were eating up more of the CPU than in the 180.44 driver. Overall, though there is not anything too exciting to look at here.

We tested Warsow and the other games in this round of benchmarking at the following resolutions: 800 x 600, 1024 x 768, 1280 x 960, 1440 x 900, 1280 x 1024, 1400 x 1050, 1680 x 1050, and 1920 x 1080. With the open-source Warsow game there was little difference between any of the four 2009 drivers tested -- less than a one frame difference.

With the more demanding Nexuiz game, the frame-rates between the four drivers spread out throughout the year were identical.