GeForce GTX 750 Series: Nouveau vs. NVIDIA Linux Driver Performance

With the forthcoming Linux 4.1 kernel there is finally out-of-the-box acceleration for the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 series on the Nouveau driver. With the Nouveau DRM/KMS driver able to self-generate the needed firmware/microcode to enable acceleration, it's quite easy to get running. However, the performance leaves a lot to be desired.

As first talked about last week, the GTX 750 Nouveau acceleration does indeed work. However, there's been text rendering problems as the primary initial issue with the GTX 750 support atop the NVC0 Gallium3D driver. Like the other recent NVIDIA GPUs on Nouveau, there's also currently a lack of proper re-clocking support so the GPU and video memory can run at the rated frequencies.

For this article I ran some basic OpenGL Linux tests on the GeForce GTX 750 and GeForce GTX 750 Ti graphics cards. The GeForce GTX 900 Maxwell series aren't yet accelerated by Nouveau. With the Linux 4.1 kernel and Mesa 10.6-devel was the Nouveau driver stack while the official NVIDIA Linux driver used was the 346.59 driver release. All benchmarks were done on Ubuntu 15.04.