Nouveau For A $10 NVIDIA Graphics Card?

The NVIDIA graphics cards used for comparing to the XFX GeForce 9600GSO were a GeForce 8500GT, 8600GT, 9500GT, 9800GT, GT 220, and GTX 460. A low-end "Fermi" was desired for this comparison, like the NVIDIA GeForce GT 520, but the Nouveau Fermi-NVD0 support is currently a broken mess. All of these graphics cards were tested with the same stock Mesa stack similar to what will be found in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, which means some of these graphics cards under Nouveau aren't running as well or fast as with the NVIDIA binary driver.

The ATI/AMD Radeon graphics cards tested with a Radeon HD 4550, HD 5450, and HD 5770, and HD 6570. Like the Nouveau testing, this was done with the defaults, which means no PCI Express 2.0 support, no 2D tiling, etc. It is the stock experience you will currently find out of the drivers.

The NVIDIA binary driver used was the 290.10 release across all the graphics cards. The binary AMD driver was Catalyst 11.11 / fglrx 8.91.4. The kernel throughout the process was Linux 3.2.0-10-generic x86_64 with X.Org Server 1.11.3. The Mesa 8.0-devel git-13daa05 snapshot was used from the Ubuntu PPA. The test bed was based around the extremely fast Intel Core i7 3960X Sandy Bridge Extreme Edition running at a 4.5GHz overclock.

Now let's see how the NVIDIA GeForce 9600GSO -- a graphics card as cheap as $10 USD -- compares to the other NVIDIA and ATI/AMD hardware across drivers under Ubuntu Linux...