Linux 2D Performance: Nouveau vs. NVIDIA

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 14 June 2014 at 06:30 AM EDT. Page 1 of 4. 27 Comments.

After last weekend delivering 30-way Intel/AMD/NVIDIA 2D Linux benchmarks this weekend I have some results comparing the GeForce GPU performance for 2D operations between the open-source Nouveau driver and the closed-source proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver.

All testing happened from the same Intel Core i7 4770K system running Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit. The Nouveau stack was powered by the Linux 3.15 kernel, Mesa 10.3-devel, and xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.10. The proprietary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver stack was the NVIDIA 337.25 proprietary driver running on Linux 3.13.

NVIDIA 2D GPU Benchmarks

The NVIDIA graphics cards used for this cross-driver comparison represented new and old GPUs and were the GeForce 9800GT, GT 520, GTX 550 Ti, GTX 650, GTX 760, and GTX TITAN. All benchmarking was handled by the Phoronix Test Suite.


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