A Lot Of New NVIDIA Linux Benchmarks Are Coming!

[Luke]

All Nvidia really needs to do is release the stuff Mesa/Gallium can't do on their own

Yes, I've heard that before. I'm not sure the patents thing is an issue. IIRC you can have a patent with the implementation being open source. What is the issue I believe is that they don't actually own all of the IP so they would have to convince their partners to open source it or allow it to be open sourced.... but a guy can wish.

I suspect the newly released power management code for Nvidia cards will bring Nouveau to parity with the AMD open driver in a matter of months. I have a GTS 450, a near match for my Radeon HD6750, and will directly compare them in the limited benchmarks I have when the memory reclocking is said to work right. An inverse benchmark in Scorced 3D some months ago, with AMD still on profiles and throttled back to match the GTS450, showed near performance parity. By next summer, the only users needed proprietary blobs might be those with very large cards needing all the optimizations, or SLI/Crossfire rigs. One other request for Nvidia: if the separate VDPAU blob for Nouveau can work with DRM/3ed party IP stripped out, please release that portion of the code, it will give you feature parity with Radeon when dynamic PM gets fully debugged. Think of it as one more front on the rekindled GPU wars!

BTW, getting 1080p video playback in VDPAU from a GT520 with the blob on a Pentium 4 was a damned nice treat for me two days ago, I expect to repeat that with Nouveau in a few months...

[DanglingPointer]

Benchmark wishlist

Now that you have these high end cards, including the 290 you bought (hopefully someone else kindly donates their 290X!); and given the following facts:

1) Ubiquitous SteamOS with 65 Million customers a sizeable chunk of whom are now curious about Linux to due to publicity.
2) Non-Source Engine AAA games starting to enter the Linux game market pushing game fidelity in our hardware.
3) Mantle on the horizon for Linux as well (Johan of DICE mentioned our platform a few times in his presentation yesterday; so we may see some if not all forthcoming DICE games on Linux through SteamOS)

Could you include in your benchmarks the following:
1) Ensure 1920 x 1080p resolution is the focus of the benchmark and not higher resolutions (SteamOS will be targeting the living room for Full HD TVs)
2) All UNIGINE OpenGL tests. Every single one of them (perhaps dial up the settings to the maximum).
3) Metro Last Light on max settings
4) Wargame Airland Battle on max settings
5) LFD2 on max settings
6) Heat and noise stability using GpuTest's Furmark, TessMark, and GiMark; this is so comparisons can be made with the same cards performance under Windows.

Kindest regards and we are looking forward to your tests in whatever shape or form you choose!