NVIDIA 169.04 Driver Brings Improvements

[Cyrus_the_virus]

Last week NVIDIA introduced the 169.04 Beta Linux driver for their GeForce and Quadro graphics cards. This X.Org driver contained a number of GeForce 8 fixes, initial support for the GeForce 8800GT graphics card, monitoring of PowerMizer state information, and other changes. More information on the 169.04 Beta driver is available in this article. What we had not tested, however, at that time was a performance comparison of the new driver and the previous 100.14.23 driver. The undocumented fact we have found is that this 169.04 Beta driver does deliver performance improvements for the GeForce 8 series on Linux.

The PowerMizer area in the nvidia-settings panel shows whether adaptive clocking has been enabled, the GPU clock and memory clock frequencies, the power source, performance level, and performance mode. PowerMizer is oriented for mobile NVIDIA customers.

The graphics card we used for testing in this article was an ASUS GeForce 8600GT 256MB. The rest of the system components included an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ processor, Abit NF-M2 nView motherboard, and 2GB of A-DATA DDR2-800 Vitesta Extreme memory. Running on the system was Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" with the Linux 2.6.22 kernel and X server 1.3.

Benchmarks had consisted of Doom 3, Quake 4, and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.

When the GeForce 8 series support for Linux was introduced, we had found its performance lagged behind the NVIDIA ForceWare driver for Windows. In that article we found that the GeForce 8 Linux performance delta was much larger than what had existed for the GeForce 6 series. In subsequent driver updates we have seen performance improvements. Most notably, with the NVIDIA 100.14.19 driver with a GeForce 8800GTS 640MB we found major performance gains. With the NVIDIA 169.04 Beta driver we have once again found significant performance improvements for the GeForce 8 series on Linux. While there were no improvements with the GeForce 8600GT in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, the improvements were very noticeable in Doom 3 and Quake 4. This updated Linux driver has also corrected some monitor issues we previously had with incorrectly parsing the EDID information and other bugs. Shortly we will be delivering more GeForce 8 benchmarks with this new driver as well as a NVIDIA GeForce 8600GTS review.

Source: Phoronix

[praka123]

well,great news for Linux/OSS users.nvidia FTW,although proprietory

[Gigacore]

yeah its really great to see drivers being launched for linux now and then..

[CadCrazy]

Very good news. Thank you very much for info

[Cyrus_the_virus]

Originally Posted by CadCrazy

Very good news. Thank you very much for info

Thanks, just keeping open source in the open

[ray|raven]

Sweet.Its good to see such support from the major gfx card makers.
Hope game makers take the que and launch native ports to new games.

And Cyrus,thanks for letting us know.

Regards,
ray

[naveen_reloaded]

Thanks for the info

[CadCrazy]

Hey you winboy read it carefully

Originally Posted by Cyrus_the_virus

Thanks, just keeping open source in the open

But nvidia is still keeping it close

[Cyrus_the_virus]

Originally Posted by CadCrazy

But nvidia is still keeping it close

They will soon make things more transparent.. common, they are trying hard.. they atleast got to the first stage, lets all give them a pat on the back and say, keep up the good work, things will eventually fall in place.

[praka123]

noveuvo(nv) open source driver for nvidia is developing fast.

[Charan]

is there any improvement in performance on 7 series cards?