A 14-Way Comparison Of NVIDIA vs. Nouveau Drivers

In OpenArena, the very well known open-source ioquake3-based game, the results are similar to the World of Padman findings: for low and mid-range NVIDIA graphics cards, Linux 3.2 / Mesa 7.12-devel Git is now faster than the binary driver. For the GeForce 8600GTS, the frame-rate of Nouveau was even 164 FPS while the NVIDIA driver was at 107 FPS, this was huge. Both drivers rendered OpenArena correctly. Nouveau continues to struggle to compete with the NVIDIA binary driver for higher-end graphics processors. OpenArena was especially tough on the Fermi GTX 460 where its frame-rate was 24 FPS under Nouveau and 467 FPS with the closed-source driver.