NVIDIA 1.0-8183 Performance

With the discovery yesterday of the NVIDIA Linux 1.0-8183 display drivers on HP servers, we have now had some time to complete a few tests that are designed to distinguish any performance differences between these drivers in just a few of our traditional array of Linux gaming and workstation benchmarks. The NVIDIA Linux drivers used were the latest official ones supported by the green folks at this time -– 1.0-8178 -– and then these newly discovered 1.0-8183 drivers that were built late February and finally the 1.0-8751 drivers. The 1.0-8751 drivers at this time are not publicly accessible, however, we at Phoronix have managed to obtain these drivers for media coverage. These 1.0-8751 Beta drivers were built in early March and contain support for the new GeForce 7 solutions as well as other enhancements, which we have been documenting at Phoronix since we got our hands on them. Look forward to NVIDIA's next official driver step to come in early April –- unless of course a delay ends up taking place. The system configuration used for these miniature tests was a Fedora Core 4 installation with the 2.6.15 x86_64 SMP Linux kernel. The hardware components consisted of an Intel Pentium D 820 processor running at 2.80GHz, 2 x 512MB DDR2-667, Western Digital 160GB SATA2 hard drive, eVGA e-GeForce 6800GT 256MB PCI Express, Swiftech CPU water cooling, and a Tyan Tomcat i7230A S5160. The Tyan i7230A is based upon Intel's E7230 MCH + ICH-7R Mukilteo Chipset. The tests simply used for this short testing extravaganza was Enemy Territory (traditional Railgun demo) and SPECViewPerf v8.1 with the 3dsmax-03, catia-01, and ensight-01 sets. Additional testing will be performed upon the official release of these updated NVIDIA drivers.

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Enemy Territory v2.60 (Railgun)
800 x 600
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1.0-8178: 66.9
1.0-8183: 66.8
1.0-8751: 66.5

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Enemy Territory v2.60 (Railgun)
1280 x 1024
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1.0-8178: 63.2
1.0-8183: 63.2
1.0-8751: 63.2

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SPECViewPerf v8.1
3dsmax-03
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1.0-8178: 4.328
1.0-8183: 4.326
1.0-8751: 4.336

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SPECViewPerf v8.1
catia-01
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1.0-8178: 3.300
1.0-8183: 3.301
1.0-8751: 3.309

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SPECViewPerf v8.1
ensight-01
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1.0-8178: 7.189
1.0-8183: 7.210
1.0-8751: 7.196

It looks as though any performance benefits have taken a back seat to appending new features and largely addressing existing bugs. Of course, these benchmarks today only stress a small portion of the available Linux testing areas and only on a single system setup. Upon these new official drivers, as always, we will continue our investigation to see how the new drivers shall fair overall and in different environments. If any readers encounter any other changes in these 1.0-8183 drivers, feel free to report them to us using our contact page.