NVIDIA GeForce 400 "Fermi" Series On Nouveau

Starting with Nexuiz, on average across the four resolutions tested between 800 x 600 and 1290 x 1080, the NVIDIA binary Linux driver is more than 14 times faster than this first-cut Nouveau NVC0 Gallium3D driver. The GeForce GTX 460, a medium-range Fermi GPU, could not even hit 30 FPS in Nexuiz.

As you can see here, the Fermi NVC0 support is well behind that of the NV50 generation. The GeForce GT 220 was even nearly twice as fast as the GeForce GTX 460 for Nexuiz running at a mere 800 x 600.

At 1920 x 1080 for Nexuiz, the binary blob was 2.18x faster than Gallium3D on the 9800GT, the blob was just 1.09x faster on the GeForce GT 220, but for the GeForce GTX 460 the 270.30 Beta is 15.4x faster. This initial NVC0 driver is clearly lacking some critical optimizations.