This year the open-source NVIDIA Linux driver (Nouveau) continued to evolve with improvements for re-clocking, the start of OpenGL 4 support, and other new functionality. Here's a recap along with some performance benchmarks showing how the OpenGL performance evolved over the past 12 months.

Over 2015 the Nouveau NVC0 driver for Fermi and newer GPUs received OpenGL 4.1 support along with various other OpenGL 4 extensions. This reverse-engineered, community-based driver is basically on par right now with the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for OpenGL 4 support and actually beat RadeonSI to exposing OpenGL 4.1. The Nouveau driver stack also made other progress this year when it comes to working on compute/OpenCL support, texture compression (including ETC2 and ASTC), video acceleration, and other features.

With the Linux 4.2 kernel there was the big DRM driver rework to restructure the code and offer improvements going forward. The Nouveau user-space recently landed the support for using the new kernel interfaces to enhance the driver's design, lower memory use, and faster GPU virtual memory.