Nouveau Linux 4.5 vs. NVIDIA OpenGL Performance: Open-Source Not Up To Par

First up is Valve's Counter-Strike: Global Offensive game.

With the GeForce GTX 650 re-clocking properly on Nouveau once manually done so via pstate, the performance relative to the NVIDIA proprietary driver is quite decent. However, with the other cards (GTX 680 / 760 / 780 Ti), the performance was around half the speed or less of the proprietary driver... The GTX 680 and GTX 780 Ti at least provided playable frame-rates on the Nouveau driver, but they were significantly slower than using the proprietary driver.

While OpenArena is a very basic game benchmark, it does show the GTX 680 and GTX 780 Ti were made slightly faster by the Linux 4.5 kernel. However, the performance remains significantly behind the levels offered via the official NVIDIA Linux driver.