Nouveau Drags Behind Intel & Radeon For Linux 2D Performance

With the first QGears2 test using X RENDER we don't see much of a difference between the Radeon GPUs tested (even when it comes to GLAMOR vs. EXA for the different hardware generations) or with Intel's SNA, but the one item we do notice is that Nouveau's 2D performance was dramatically slower than the Intel and Radeon drivers... Either due to the lack of re-clocking or some problem in the driver's code-path; we haven't recently looked too closely at the open-source Nouveau 2D driver stack.

With the image scaling test in QGears2, the Haswell graphics integrated on the Core i7 4770K CPU were slower than the Radeon GPUs with their open-source driver. When it came to the Radeon performance, the Radeon HD 5000/6000 series that uses EXA was delivering faster performance than the Radeon HD 7000 series and newer hardware bound to GLAMOR. Lastly, the Nouveau driver performance for the Fermi and Kepler graphics cards were again the slowest of the nine GPUs tested.