The Open-Source NVIDIA Linux Driver Continued Evolving In 2015

This 2015 Nouveau comparison is similar to that of the recent Intel Haswell 2015 retrospective and the evolution of AMD's open-source performance in 2015. The software comparison included:

- Using Ubuntu 14.10 for a look at the Nouveau driver performance at the end of 2014. Ubuntu 14.10 had the Linux 3.16 kernel and Mesa 10.3.2.

- Using Ubuntu 15.10 with the Linux Git kernel with the latest re-clocking patches and Mesa 11.2-devel.

From the Core i7 5960X Haswell-E system, the GeForce GTX 650, GTX 680, GTX 760, and GTX 780 Ti graphics cards were tested. GTX 600/700 series hardware was used since no GTX 900 series graphics card could be tested for lack of Nouveau accelerated support at this time, as mentioned on the previous page. Each graphics card was re-clocked to its highest performance state supported.

All of the OpenGL benchmarks were run via the Phoronix Test Suite. For this end-of 2014 vs. 2015 comparison, only up to OpenGL 3 benchmarks could be used since the OpenGL 4.1 support only arrived over the course of 2015.

First up with the OpenArena benchmark we see big boosts in performance for all the GTX 650. These differences really come down to the graphics cards being able to re-clock higher with the latest code of being able to run stable at the 0f performance state over 0a. With the GTX 650 there was no difference in performance since with that GPU it was able to re-clock to the 0f performance state successfully since 2014.

As the results show and I've mentioned recently in other articles, there still is more work to do on the re-clocking front such as with the GTX 780 Ti being slower than lower-end Kepler GPUs since there are still some outstanding issues for select cards / video BIOSes.