A 14-Way Comparison Of NVIDIA vs. Nouveau Drivers

World of Padman is the first ioquake3-based game being tested in this article, which usually is usually in great shape for Mesa / Gallium3D. The Nouveau performance for the hardware that worked was quite admirable. In fact, some of these results illustrate a huge milestone! This is the first set of published Nouveau benchmarks where the open-source Nouveau driver was faster than the proprietary NVIDIA driver, when both drivers rendered the OpenGL correctly. World of Padman is far from being the most demanding OpenGL Linux benchmark, but this is a huge milestone where the open-source drivers generally lag behind, even for the Radeon Gallium3D stack.

The GPUs that ended up being faster (or very close to the same frame-rate) was the GeForce 8400GS, GeForce 8600GT, GeForce 8600GTS, and GeForce 9500GT. The other higher-end NVIDIA GPUs all performed much better with the official driver. With the current-generation GeForce GTX 460, Padman ran at just 32 FPS while the binary driver pushed it over 400 FPS.