Mesa 8.1 Will Offer Some Speed Improvements For Nouveau

After last week sharing results for AMD Radeon R600g Gallium3D on Mesa 8.0 and 8.1-devel, here are benchmarks for several NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards comparing the OpenGL Gallium3D performance with Nouveau on Mesa 8.0 stable and Mesa 8.1-devel.

Mesa 8.1 is set for release in August so I have been going through and preparing new 8.0 vs. 8.1 benchmarks for all of the key drivers/hardware. These benchmarks are very straight forward and up for testing in this article is using Nouveau Gallium3D on the NVIDIA GeForce 8400GS, 9500GT, 9800GTX, and GT 220 graphics cards.

Re-clocking the graphics card was attempted for each graphics card to its highest performance state except for configurations where the clocking failed. The frequencies located in the table above are the operating frequencies used with the Nouveau DRM driver. Mesa 8.0.4 was compared to a recent Mesa 8.1-devel Git snapshot. The Linux 3.5 kernel on an Ubuntu 12.10 development snapshot was used for all testing. Due to the libdrm breakage that occurred earlier this year, when comparing Mesa 8.0.4 and 8.1-devel, different xf86-video-nouveau DDX and libdrm revisions had to be used for maintaining Mesa Nouveau compatibility.

All benchmarking was done via the Phoronix Test Suite. A greater selection of NVIDIA tests (including a comparison against the binary blob) will be done when Mesa 8.1 is officially available next month.