Thursday, July 12, 2007

Nouveau Driver 2D performance exceeds Nvidia driver

Source: Nouveau 2D progress

Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us

Richard Hughes has just published results from the gtkperf performance test.

Results:

Nouveau: 24.86 seconds
NV: 40.78 seconds


Which is a 64% improvement over the existing Nvidia sponsored nv driver.

This is a very limited 2D only test and does not represent 3D performance but it does show that the developers are making good progress.

The Nouveau driver is quickly gaining support within the various distros. Fedora 7 shipped with an alpha version of the driver and Ubuntu has committed to assisting and supporting the project.


Related:
Nouveau Driver Homepage

Updated:
To better show the improvements here is a benchmark comparing the free NV driver to the closed source Nvidia driver: NVIDIA Xserver driver Benchmark
In this benchmark (using a GeForce2 MX) the closed source Nvidia driver has a performance gain of 36% over the free NV driver. As Nouveau driver had a 64% improvement it even exceeds the Nvidia driver.

These figures should not really be treated as equal as they are using completely different Nvidia drivers. (6xxx series to hopefully the new 9x or 10x drivers.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

YES! Even MORE FPS on my latest 2D game!... Hope they come out with the 3D one soon lol

Anonymous said...

Um is this driver open-source? if it is i am very happy. proprietary drivers destroy the whole point of linux, and are a really big disadvantage to the open source system .

boo nvidia, im going to buy intel!

Anonymous said...

You mean ATI. Yes it is open source. ATI's drivers are not open source either. If your comparing nVidia's graphics with Intel's then go ahead and stick with Intel.

No, closed source software does not hurt Linux or the open source world, as much as the FSF wants you to believe so.
There has to be a balance.

TreviƱo said...

Just for a more complete comparison, which are the 'nvidia' proprietary driver performances?

Unknown said...

Yes, I also would like to see how it stacks up to the proprietary driver.

peter.vk said...

Update with some more info.

Anonymous said...

Either you got something messed up or a really slow ass pc. I have the nvidia driver 100.14.09 and a Pentium D 945. My tests were done in: 6.95, 7.03, 6.75, 6.65, 5.11, 6.22, 7.43 seconds.

peter.vk said...

If you follow the link you will see the specs:
Hardware: AMD64 3500+, 1GB RAM, Geforce2 MX
Software: Ubuntu warty, GTK+ 2.4.10, Xserver XFree 4.3.0, nvidia-kernel-common: 1.0.6111+1ubuntu1, nvidia-glx: 1.0.6111-1ubuntu9. Using Xserver "vesa", "nv" and "nvidia" drivers.

Everything your running is faster and better, of course you blew the benchmark out of the water. I just linked to a "published" benchmark.

Anonymous said...

there are three drivers:
nv, nvidia and nouveau.

nv is the old 2d-only FOSS driver.
nvidia is the proprietary driver developped by nvidia, with the best performances.
nouveau is a new FOSS driver that will most likely replace nv, with 2d AND 3d support.

This article compares the nouveau and nv drivers, not nouveau and nvidia.

Of course the proprietary driver is faster. That's not the point.