Five-Way NVIDIA GeForce Comparison On Nouveau

When starting off with Doom 3, the GeForce GTX 680 and GeForce 9800GTX graphics cards were the fastest. The slowest were the GeForce GTX 460 and GeForce 8400GS. While the GeForce GTX 460 "Fermi" should be the second-fastest graphics card of this five-way NVIDIA GPU comparison, its boot speeds that were used by Nouveau is a very slow 50 MHz on its core and 135MHz for the video memory, which made even the very old GeForce 8400GS almost as fast since its core was running at 500MHz and 333MHz for the discrete video memory. The other graphics cards were at the common 399/399MHz frequency stepping. Unfortunately the Nouveau Kepler support doesn't even correctly parse the GPU core/memory frequencies, so its operating frequencies during this testing were unknown, but at least it was as fast as the 9800GTX.

The GeForce GTX 680 "Kepler" can be as fast as the GeForce 9800GTX on this reverse-engineered community-backed driver while the GeForce GTX 460 "Fermi" is stuck to the performance level of a GeForce 8400GS until the re-clocking situation is sorted out in a future Linux kernel release.

The GeForce 9800GTX even beats the GeForce GTX 680 in some of the benchmarks...

Those frequently using the Nouveau driver on their Linux desktop should pray that the re-clocking situation and related power management items get sorted out in the Linux 3.9 kernel or as soon as possible.