Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Works On Some GeForce 700 GPUs, Fails On Others

For pre-Fermi GPUs the Nouveau driver does have some re-clocking support but it's not enabled by default and tends to be rather unstable and prone to regressions between Linux kernel releases. When re-clocking does work on the older GeForce GPUs, the Nouveau driver performance is much closer to the proprietary NVIDIA driver since the clock speeds are no longer stuck to being dramatically low.

With the Linux 3.13 kernel there is new Nouveau re-clocking code for the newer NVIDIA GPUs, but video memory re-clocking still isn't working right so the new re-clocking code for Linux 3.13 isn't yet beneficial for end-users of this open-source GPU driver.

According to the sysfs information reported from the Linux 3.13 Git kernel, the GeForce GTX 760 and GTX 770 were bound to running with a 405MHz core frequency and 324MHz vRAM frequency -- dramatically lower than the rated frequencies of a 980MHz core clock with 1033MHz Boost clock and 6GHz video memory clock. The GTX 770 has a 1046MHz core base clock meanwhile and its Boost clock is 1085MHz with 7GHz of GDDR5 video memory.

Should you really want to buy a high-end NVIDIA Kepler driver only to use it with the currently limited Nouveau driver, on the following pages are the results of the Nouveau driver (Linux 3.13 + Mesa 10.1-devel + xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.10) compared to the proprietary NVIDIA 331.20 graphics driver on Ubuntu 13.10 x86_64. All testing happened from the Intel Core i7 4770K test rig. Benchmarking was facilitated in a fully automated and repeatable way using the Phoronix Test Suite software.