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

While the open-source NVIDIA driver really can't deliver any playable frame-rates for the GeForce 700 series graphics cards due to the lack of re-clocking support for properly driving the graphics cards to their rated frequencies, it was a bit surprising to see the GeForce GTX 760/770 running stable with the driver. The OpenGL performance was slow, but the Gallium3D driver was working correctly and advertising its OpenGL 3.1 support (albeit, a long shot from the OpenGL 4.3/4.4 support provided by the official driver). Until the re-clocking is figured out and the 700 series support stabilized, it only makes sense to use the closed-source NVIDIA driver.

Meanwhile the NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN and GTX 780 Ti failed to have any hardware acceleration support with the Nouveau driver due to different issues, but hopefully within a few months these GK110 GPUs will be better supported by the reverse-engineered driver. Thanks again to NVIDIA for sending out these GeForce 700 series review samples and for beginning to support the open-source community with some level of documentation and technical help. Next year should be much more interesting for the Nouveau driver and will hopefully be greeted by decent "out of the box" support on modern NVIDIA GPUs.

If you are wanting to exclusively use an open-source driver for your graphics processor, as an integrated solution I would recommend for Linux desktop users Haswell processors since the Intel Linux GPU driver is the best and most full-featured open-source driver. The Intel driver also tends to be the first Mesa driver receiving new OpenGL support since the work is being done by Intel's Open-Source Technology Center. If you want to use open-source drivers but are after discrete graphics and performance that's worthy for Linux gaming, check out the Radeon HD 5000/6000 series graphics cards. The AMD HD 5000/6000 series work very well with the latest Linux kernel and R600 Gallium3D driver where as the HD 7000 series and newer GPUs is far less mature on the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

If you're looking for more NVIDIA GeForce benchmarks under Linux see the large comparison in my GTX 780 Ti Linux review and this week's Windows 8.1 vs. Ubuntu 13.10 benchmarks. Coming out soon will also be a fresh open-source vs. closed-source GPU comparison of both AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards spanning multiple generations. If you appreciate this thorough but timely benchmarking done under Linux exclusively at Phoronix, please consider becoming a premium member.