NVIDIA Linux 2009 Year In Review

With VDrift being one of the games where the performance had fluctuated between NVIDIA driver releases, we ran the vdrift-fps-monitor test profile in the Phoronix Test Suite to look at its frame-rate every second during the test run. As you can see, the frame-rate actually changes quite a bit in different areas of the game, but nothing definitive can be gathered from this information at least on our end but that there doesn't seem to be a single spot within this game where one driver is doing better or worse than another.

We also ran some of our image quality comparison tests within the Phoronix Test Suite on these four NVIDIA driver releases from this year. However, there were no visual differences to note of regressions of any kind.

The test results from the four NVIDIA drivers used for our yearly driver examination show that in some games there are no differences in performance while in a few games there were performance improvements presented in the 185.xx/190.xx drivers, but for at least right now those are largely erased with the latest 195.xx beta (particularly with the id Tech 4 engine). In the more-demanding Unigine game engine, the 195.xx driver is running the best.

While there is not an exciting performance story to share this year in terms of NVIDIA's driver evolution, this year we continued to be provided with prompt support for new hardware, timely support for OpenGL 3.1/3.2, VDPAU enhancements in almost every driver release, OpenCL support, and plenty of fixes and other underlying improvements. Overall, it has been a good year for NVIDIA and Linux when it comes to their proprietary driver. Share your thoughts or hopes for NVIDIA and Linux in 2010 over in our forums.