Nouveau Driver Still Tries To Compete With NVIDIA

Kicking things off with Doom 3, the best cards running on the Nouveau reverse-engineered driver were the GeForce 8600GTS and GeForce 9500GT. The 8600GTS graphics card on the Nouveau driver and at the same clock frequencies to the NVIDIA binary driver was running at 55% the speed of the OpenGL driver. The 9500GT was at 45% the frame-rate of the NVIDIA binary blob, which for a low-end card was also less than 30 FPS for Doom 3 at 1920 x 1080 with low quality settings.

The Lightsmark results across the board for the Nouveau driver were disappointing.