Nouveau Benchmarks Lack Change On Mesa 9.2

Phoronix benchmarks have already shown that Mesa 9.2 dramatically improves the Intel Haswell Linux experience and that there's even some performance gains for other intel GPUs. On the AMD Radeon side, Mesa 9.2 also improves the performance for AMD hardware. How does Mesa 9.2 change the game for the Nouveau driver with NVIDIA graphics hardware? Here's some new results looking at the Mesa 9.1 vs. Mesa 9.2 performance for Nouveau, the reverse-engineered open-source NVIDIA graphics driver.

In this article for comparing the Mesa 9.1 vs. 9.2 Git branches with regard to their OpenGL performance, a NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX and NVIDIA GeForce GT 220 were used. Both of these graphics cards support manual re-clocking on modern Linux kernel releases without many rendering artifacts or stability issues. These are two of the NVIDIA GPUs that can actually overclock right now on the mainline Linux kernel; benchmarking the latest Fermi/Kepler GPUs were avoided for this comparison due to their low clock speeds and inability to easily force them higher with the Nouveau driver.

From our Intel Core i7 4770K Haswell system the GeForce 9800GTX and GeForce GT 220 graphics cards were benchmarked with the Mesa 9.1.6 and Mesa 9.2-devel Git code as of this week while running from the Linux 3.8 kernel on Ubuntu 13.04. Xfce 4.10 was the Linux desktop environment that was deployed. All benchmarking was handled in a fully automated manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite test platform. All other settings remained the same during testing.