How good are the open-source Nvidia drivers (Nouveau)?

Question

I learned that Ubuntu 11.10 would come with Open-source Nvidia drivers by default. I have an Nvidia 9600M GT graphics card and have always had to install the proprietary Nvidia drivers after installing Ubuntu. I would love to have it pre-installed in form of this open-source driver. However, i wonder if it is on par, in terms of performance with 3d intensive applications such as games with its Proprietary counterpart

Solution 1

No, it's not on par with the binary drivers from Nvidia, which shouldn't be surprising as it initially was a replacement for the old -nv driver.

See this Phoronix article for some numbers.

Solution 2

Having used those drivers with that very card in my laptop, I'm sorry to inform you that you won't be playing Xotonic and Urban terror with it. It might be possible to (experimentally) enable 3D support, but you would be disappointed for now. However, 2D performance is great, and you can get some slick output on your ttys thanks to Kernel mode setting (which also made it boot faster woo hoo)...

But stick with the proprietary drivers for now.

Solution 3

The most important 2D features are working for all cards and the performance is better than with the old nv driver. 3D is under heavy development but its support has been removed from the packages used by Ubuntu. Otherwise, the working features depend on the used graphic card but KMS, suspend and dual head (randr1.2) work mostly for all cards.

The feature/status table is available at http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FeatureMatrix

Comments

[muyiscoi]

that's too bad. i was really hoping to check that off my list of pet peeves on Ubuntu. the proprietary drivers screw up the bootup and i only get a blinking cursor until i get to the login window.

[muyiscoi]

okay. thanks. I hope it gets improvements soon though

[Rinzwind]

did you make a AU q for that problem? Might be fixable :=)

[muyiscoi]

just did a search on AU for the bootup issue and it seems to affect quite a number of people and nobody has fully solved it from what i could see. also, the problem seems to stem from using proprietary drivers of either Nvidia or ATI.

[Jeremy Bicha]

Nouveau does do some 3D in Ubuntu 11.10. Full Unity works pretty well on my wife's computer for instance.

[papukaija]

I guess that the 3D has been enabled in Oneiric then. Good news!

[zookalicious]

news.softpedia.com/news/… I find this works on 10.04, 10.10, and 11.04. Haven't tested 11.10 yet, but I think it should still be fine.