Nouveau For Open-Source NVIDIA In Mesa 8.0 Is Mixed

The VDrift performance with the GeForce 8600GTS sees a dramatic boost in frame-rate with the forthcoming Mesa 8.0 release. This jives with some performance boosts found under Mesa 8.0 for VDrift in the other drivers too. However, the GeForce 9 and Fermi hardware remains unchanged by Mesa 8.0. The NVIDIA binary performance was not compared here since Mesa does not compile all of the shaders properly for this game so it ends up with an artificially higher frame-rate than the NVIDIA binary driver.

With the OpenArena game the performance of the NVIDIA binary driver remains several times better than Nouveau Gallium3D driver. For the GeForce 9500GT and GeForce 8600GTS graphics cards, Nouveau is reported as being faster than the NVIDIA binary blob, but that's due to regressions on the NVIDIA binary driver side. The NVIDIA binary driver was being rather sporadic in this CPU-bound game and at times looks like it was falling back to software acceleration with this old OpenGL game.