Testing NVIDIA's Linux Threaded OpenGL Optimizations

The NVIDIA 310.14 Beta driver for Linux does seem to deliver measurable performance improvements over the current 304.51 stable driver release -- at least for the GTX 680 Kepler graphics card that was used for this round of testing -- but the OpenGL threaded optimization work is a mess at this point.

With the range of OpenGL games benchmarked from many ioquake3 titles to the Unigine Engine, there were issues at every step. Fortunately, the new code-path is protected by an environment variable and it will hopefully remain this way until NVIDIA is able to work out all of the issues. The 310.14 Beta driver is certainly worth trying out by Linux desktop enthusiasts not for this threaded optimization work but for OpenGL 4.3 support, VDPAU video playback enhancements, and much more.

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