NVIDIA's Linux Driver On Ubuntu Is Very Competitive With Windows 8

Starting with the defunct Nexuiz game, which is still being tested due to its comparable binaries on Windows and Linux, the results were interesting. Nexuiz failed to run with the Nouveau driver on the Fermi/Kepler cards with the Mesa 9.2-devel commit used at the time of testing while the 9800GTX was a little more than half the speed of the binary driver when tested on Nouveau.

The GeForce GTX 460 on Ubuntu 13.10 with the latest NVIDIA Linux beta driver was a little slower than Windows 8 Pro and its NVIDIA beta driver, but the GeForce GTX 680 Kepler was much faster under Linux than with Windows.

With the open-source OpenArena game the frame rate between the Windows and Linux binary drivers were comparable for the 9800GTX and GTX 460, while the GTX 680 Kepler GPU was noticeably better on Linux. The 9800GTX Nouveau performance was decent while this open-source driver performed poorly on the Kepler/Fermi GPUs due to the low clock speeds when using this default graphics driver.

The frame latency was obviously at its highest when having to deal with Nouveau rather than the first-rate NVIDIA binary drivers.