Running The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 On An Open-Source Driver

In another ioquake3-based game, the proprietary NVIDIA driver is nearly 15 times faster than the open-source driver that still lacks proper re-clocking.

Xonotic with low quality effects at 1920 x 1080 allowed the Kepler Gallium3D driver on the GeForce GTX 680 to deliver an average of 86 FPS. The NVIDIA 295.40 driver for this test was at over 300 FPS.

While the Nouveau driver performance on the Kepler-based NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 graphics card is many times slower than the official NVIDIA Linux driver, the results are rather surprising in a positive way. This first GeForce 600 series graphics card was just launched last month yet it already has working open-source support with OpenGL acceleration, this is quite a change from past generations where it has taken several months for any level of hardware enablement.

Even AMD, which has their official open-source driver and developers dedicated to the project, are still working on Radeon HD 7000 series 3D support (Granted, the Radeon HD 6000 to HD 7000 series is architecturally much more different than the transition from Fermi to Kepler). It is also interesting that the Nouveau developers somehow managed to get two GeForce GTX 680 graphics cards in advance of the hardware's public debut.

Stay tuned as the Kepler support is sure to mature over the coming months and there will be plenty more benchmarks. In the meantime, you can read the full NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Linux review from last week.