Installing nVidia Driver in Ubuntu 10.04 with PAE

The nouveaux driver isn't quite there yet with hardware accelerated 3D support, but as far as 2D performance, I was pleasantly surprised at how snappy the nouveaux drivers are. It made me realize just how annoyingly sluggish the nvidia driver is on 2D performance.

Try this little test with the nvidia driver, and then with the nouveaux driver: Grab a gnome terminal by the title bar and drag it rapidly around the screen. On my desktop, under nvidia, the movement is sluggish, with artifacts and glitches. With the nouveaux drivers, it's crisp, snappy and silky smooth. On my work machine, I'm keeping the nouveaux drivers.

At home, where I play 3D fps games, I'll need to keep the nvidia drivers for now - but I look forward to seeing nouveaux get to the point where it can handle ut2004, ET, OA etc.

So...

how does nouveau do with full screen flash?

Quoting:The nouveaux driver isn't quite there yet with hardware accelerated 3D support

GLXGears worked fine, when I tested my NV43 (Geforce 6600 LE that is) on Fedora 13 Beta.

But I didn't think about other tests yet, what other 3D tests could I perform on Linux? Installing something would be a small hassle too, as I'm running it from LiveUSB without persistent storage as of now.

Quoting:how does nouveau do with full screen flash?

Let me get back to you on that. I'm sure that one valid answer would be "not as good as it's going to be"....

Quoting:what other 3D tests could I perform on Linux?

Phoronix test suite? Alternatively, try installing some 3D game like Nexuiz.

I get about 680 fps with glxgears, but this is an old dell optiplex gx270 - it's not enough for doom3, but OA might work - I haven't tried yet since it's my office desktop.