Open-Source Nouveau Driver Remains Slow For NVIDIA's Fermi, Kepler

These results didn't come as a big surprise given the past Fermi/Kepler benchmarks on Phoronix using the reverse-engineered open-source Nouveau driver. For those wanting to use the open-source Nouveau driver over NVIDIA's closed-source driver, the GeForce 9 and GeForce 200 series tends to be where the best support is currently found and with there is experimental re-clocking support that can be enabled but it doesn't always play nicely for all graphics cards. An updated open vs. closed-source comparison for these older NVIDIA GPUs is forthcoming on Phoronix with Linux 3.12 and Mesa 10.0.