Nouveau On Mesa 10.5-devel Doesn't Change Much

Last week I ran benchmarks showing Intel HD Graphics having some changes with Mesa 10.5-devel Git and improvements with the AMD Gallium3D drivers. Rounding out the Mesa Git master tests, here's some tests with the open-source NVIDIA graphics performance via Nouveau.

This article is shorter than the other two as I just used two Kepler graphics cards for testing. Only two GPUs were used since the more pressing item for Nouveau is about GPU re-clocking rather than micro-optimizations within the Gallium3D drivers. The tested GPUs were the GeForce GTX 650, which is the only NVIDIA GPU that I've yet to encounter that can fully re-clock under Nouveau (to the 0f performance state), and then a GeForce GTX 760, a graphics card like the rest that can only reach the 0a performance state and thus is rather handicapped when it comes to the hardware capabilities.

With these tests ranging from Counter-Strike: Global Offensive to Xonotic, there wasn't much change in performance when comparing Mesa 10.3 from Ubuntu Utopic to Mesa 10.5-devel Git from last week. The Linux 3.18 kernel was used during testing.

Those wishing to look at this Nouveau test data can visit OpenBenchmarking.org.