Even With Re-Clocking, Nouveau Remains Behind NVIDIA's Proprietary Linux Driver

Given that it's only with the Kepler graphics cards where re-clocking took place, it's understandable that the older NVIDIA GPUs take a big beating when using the Linux 3.16 Nouveau DRM. Even with the GeForce 600/700 series hardware, there's a big difference in performance. The GTX 650 could re-clock to its fully-rated clock frequencies, in which place the performance was about 80% the performance of NVIDIA's 340 Linux driver. With the GTX 680 and GTX 760 where the re-clocking didn't fully work the frame-rates were 39% and 44% the speed of the official drivers.

When running Unigine Tropics at 1920 x 1080, none of the tested graphics cards could exceed 60 FPS with the open-source NVIDIA driver.