Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Works On Some GeForce 700 GPUs, Fails On Others

Given the significant clock speed differences between drivers, it's no surprise at all that the NVIDIA 331.20 official graphics driver is over six times faster than the open-source driver. While the performance is horrible on Nouveau for the high-end GeForce GTX 760 and 770, it is a bit surprising that Counter-Strike: Source could at least run at 35 FPS for these two graphics cards at 2560 x 1600.

When GeForce 400/500/600/700 series re-clocking is working for Nouveau, the OpenGL performance will likely be significantly closer to binary NVIDIA driver just like our testing of older NVIDIA hardware where re-clocking is found with hit-or-miss support.

I certainly wouldn't advise any GeForce 700 graphics card owner to use Nouveau at this time given that not all GPUs even work with Nouveau and the ones that do are severely crippled, but at least the Nouveau driver keeps advancing -- which up until recently didn't receive any direct support from NVIDIA, but now some documentation is starting to trickle.