Nouveau For Open-Source NVIDIA In Mesa 8.0 Is Mixed

When starting with Doom 3 at a resolution of 1920 x 1080, across the four NVIDIA GeForce GPUs that were tested, there were no performance differences between Mesa 7.11 and Mesa 8.0. There were some interesting findings nevertheless:

- The GeForce GTX 460 is abysmal. This is actually no surprise that the NVIDIA binary driver is 21x faster than the Nouveau NVC0 driver with Mesa 8.0 and the Linux 3.2 kernel, which will be found in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. The Linux 3.2 DRM does not have the Fermi re-clocking and with this latest stable kernel the Fermi support is still rather immature. By default, its performance is currently quite poor, where you are certainly best off with the proprietary driver for the time being with this newer hardware.

- For the higher-end GeForce 9800GT where the Nouveau support is rather stable and in its price, the NVIDIA binary driver is still about 3.x faster when running Doom 3 at the HD resolution with low quality settings.

- With the mid-range NVIDIA GeForce 9500GT, the NVIDIA binary blob is only about 50% faster than Nouveau Gallium3D.

- The most interesting result is for the GeForce 8600GTS graphics card. The performance when running Doom 3 is nearly the same under Nouveau Gallium3D as it is with the NVIDIA binary driver! However, this is only with low-quality settings, but is great for a reverse-engineered community-driven project.

When dropping the resolution of Doom 3 to a mere 800 x 600 while keeping the low quality settings, the GeForce 8600GTS is no longer as fast as the NVIDIA binary driver but the official NVIDIA blob is nearly twice as fast.