Similar to last week's testing of comparing the open-source vs. closed-source Radeon Linux driver performance from a stock Ubuntu 12.10 installation, the tables have now been turned to look at NVIDIA hardware on this latest Ubuntu Linux release. Benchmarks were done of the stock Nouveau open-source graphics driver, the official NVIDIA proprietary driver, and the proprietary driver when it was underclocked to match the clock frequencies as used by the reverse-engineered Nouveau driver.

This round of benchmarks is comparing the "out of the box" Nouveau driver performance to that of using the NVIDIA driver in Ubuntu 12.10, as obtained via the "nvidia-current" package in the Ubuntu Quantal archive.