NVIDIA vs. Nouveau Drivers On Ubuntu 14.10
Over the weekend I began posting Ubuntu 14.04 LTS vs. 14.10 benchmarks of the open-source Radeon Gallium3D drivers to show how their software stack has advanced. With our NVIDIA graphics testing it's slightly different since the performance state of Nouveau hasn't changed a lot in the past six months since the re-clocking support overall is still in quite inadequate shape for end-users. However, for some new open-source NVIDIA Linux benchmarks to share today is a look at the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver performance out-of-the-box on Ubuntu 14.10, then with the Oibaf PPA enabled plus the Linux 3.17 stable kernel, and lastly when using Ubuntu 14.10's supplied NVIDIA proprietary driver.
The test configurations for this NVIDIA Linux graphics testing included:
- The out-of-the-box configuration with the Linux 3.16.0-23-generic x86_64 kernel, Mesa 10.3.0, and xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.11.
- The same Ubuntu 14.10 installation but enabling the Oibaf PPA for obtaining the updated user-space components: namely, Mesa 10.4-devel from Git.
- Lastly was using the NVIDIA 331.89 proprietary driver as the latest version of NVIDIA's binary blob packaged currently in the Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic package archive.
The graphics cards for this basic Nouveau testing were the GeForce GTX 680, GTX 760, and GTX 770 as a range of Kepler graphics cards.
All of the OpenGL benchmarks in this article were executed by the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.