NVIDIA 313.09 Linux GPU Driver Benchmarks

This week the NVIDIA Linux developers released the NVIDIA 313.09 Beta Linux graphics driver. This driver packs in many new features so some early benchmarks of this first 313.xx Linux driver release have already been carried out.

The NVIDIA 313.09 Beta advertises some performance improvements for specific functions, picks up support for a few new GLX extensions, and most notably handles the GLX_EXT_buffer_age extension. This new driver paired with the experimental Compiz packages are supposed to yield new levels of Linux gaming performance.

In this weekend benchmarking, the NVIDIA 313.09 Beta was benchmarked against the NVIDIA 310.19 stable Linux graphics driver. The compositing window manager impact though isn't being compared for this quick testing but just the overall impact of the NVIDIA 313.xx driver compared to the current 310.xx driver series. As such, the Xfce 4.10 desktop was used without compositing. The graphics card for this brief testing was a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Kepler.

The results in full along with all of the system logs and other hardware/software information for this two-way NVIDIA binary blob comparison can be found on OpenBenchmarking.org. For the common OpenGL Linux benchmarks from the GeForce GTX 680 with this beta driver update, there isn't much to see in terms of raw performance changes. Stay tuned though for the more thorough Compiz benchmarking.