I have been running Fedora 13 on my computers since the day it was released, but have only just now realized that the experimental drivers it includes for nvidia gpus actually work. I initially thought it was just 2d that was accelerated and everything was done in gallium (it’s based on gallium 
) fallbacks (which AFAIR is not technically correct, but I can’t quite recall what the technical correct term is) when the driver doesn’t have it’s hardware accelerated implementation ready. This was based on running glxgears and comparing the result with what I have gotten with the blob from nvidia — where the nouveau driver (the free one) is outperformed by a factor 10 to 1 (that is nvidia does 10 times better than nouveau). Which just shows how good a benchmark glxgears is (it’s not a good benchmark). Running a few (World of Padman and OpenArena) free games with a 3d engine, I got two working which had performance in the 90fps-100fps range with everything set to the best quality (highest resolution, best filters, antialiasing, etc.). The only game I couldn’t start was Tremulous, for reasons unknown. I tried to compile the game myself but the Makefile doesn’t include an install target and I’m lazy, so I haven’t been able to test it.
Anyways — thumbs up to the guys working on nouveau. It certainly did pay off to give them all the data I collected for them through out the upgrades.
