Nouveau, the reverse-engineered open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics driver that's been in development now for the better part of a decade, is working brilliantly for some NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards while for other NVIDIA GPUs the experience is a sloppy mess. Using the Linux 3.13 kernel and Mesa 10.1-devel Gallium3D driver code installed on top of Ubuntu 13.10, here's what the experience is like when trying a number of GeForce graphics cards with this latest open-source driver code.

As part of a lot of new Linux benchmarks coming, I had mentioned in other Linux GPU driver testing articles this week that the aim was to have a new massive open-source Linux graphics card comparison out on Friday, today. That article has been delayed until this weekend as the Nouveau experience with Linux 3.13 and Mesa 10.1-devel (using the Oibaf PPA and mainline kernel PPA) from Ubuntu 13.10 x86_64 was more rough than anticipated. The testing process has been drawn out due to having to watch closely for Nouveau driver problems like system hangs and rendering problems. In this article are some Nouveau driver notes about my testing of many different graphics cards on this latest Linux 3.13 + Mesa 10.1-devel code. All of the Nouveau and Radeon Gallium3D performance results will hopefully be complete on Saturday.