How Nouveau Compares To NVIDIA's Linux Driver When Kepler Re-Clocking Works

The Xonotic results show that even with the fully re-clocked GeForce GTX 680 on the open-source Nouveau driver, there's still much greater performance out of NVIDIA's proprietary Linux graphics driver on Ubuntu.

Today's results show that the Kepler re-clocking allows for much greater performance against the NVIDIA driver -- when the re-clocking works -- but there's still more needed in the way of performance optimizations to make this open-source driver more competitive against NVIDIA's offerings. It's also important to keep in mind that the Kepler re-clocking is still a work-in-progress, the support isn't enabled by default (you need to pass a kernel command-line parameter and then manually configure the pstate via sysfs/debugfs), and that there isn't yet support for dynamic re-clocking to adjust the clock frequencies based upon load.