I blogged a few months ago about performance improvements in nouveau, the free 3D driver for NVIDIA cards. This morning I tested with nouveau ddx from git, drm master from git and kernel 2.6.24-rc6 and used the gtkperf benchmark.
Nouveau 2007-07-13: 25.24s
Nouveau 2007-12-30: 17.88s
Quite an incredible increase in speed.
On another note, I've been able to resize my screen for the first time using the normal driver, although using experimental Randr12 mode I get this:
Fun times with nouveau…
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hughsie
Richard has over 10 years of experience developing open source software. He is the maintainer of GNOME Software, PackageKit, GNOME Packagekit, GNOME Power Manager, GNOME Color Manager, colord, and UPower and also contributes to many other projects and opensource standards. Richard has three main areas of interest on the free desktop, color management, package management, and power management.
Richard graduated a few years ago from the University of Surrey with a Masters in Electronics Engineering. He now works for Red Hat in the desktop group, and also manages a company selling open source calibration equipment. Richard's outside interests include taking photos and eating good food.
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What version of X.org are you using (xorg-server to be specific)? I've heard Versions prior to 1.4.1 have poor EXA performance, which is the only thing Nouveau uses. You may get even better numbers on a newer xserver. I'd also be interested in seeing how this compares to nv.