Benchmarks Of The Latest Nouveau Gallium3D Driver

Again, with the Nouveau driver the NV92-based GeForce 8800GT/9800GTX was running at the same level at all resolutions while the proprietary OpenGL driver remained significantly faster. Even the GeForce 8500GT with the proprietary driver was able to smoke the GeForce 9800GTX with the Nouveau driver in every test.

Our last test was with the Qfusion-based Warsow game. While this game isn't too demanding on a modern GPU with a proper driver, Nouveau continued to lag behind and even with the GeForce 9800GTX graphics card on this open-source driver it wasn't able to offer a playable frame-rate at most resolutions.

It is unfortunate that the Nouveau Gallium3D driver still is not in a better standing even after being in development for years and that it is not receiving as much love as the ATI Gallium3D driver, but at least there is this open-source solution albeit with limited performance. The Nouveau Gallium3D driver is bottlenecked with the GeForce 8800GT/9800GTX performing the same and there being virtually no differences in performance when running the games at 800 x 600 up through 2560 x 1600, while being multiple times slower than the proprietary NVIDIA driver. Fortunately, the 2D side of Nouveau continues to mature and the kernel mode-setting support continues to be picked up by more distributions.