2014 Year-End NVIDIA Linux Benchmark Comparison
OpenArena is the most basic OpenGL game we still test for reference. While its frame-rates are absurdly high and the game can run on most any GPU with open/closed-source drivers, the test fortunately provided a little value for this comparison. The results show a change in frame-rate between the NVIDIA 340.17 and 343.13 drivers. There's a performance regression in the 343 series and at least as of 346.22 it hasn't been recovered. We'll see if it happens in other tests.
With Tesseract there's a more significant performance drop introduced in 2014. Between the NVIDIA 334 and 337 series is a huge drop in the frame-rate for Tesseract while all rendering appeared correct on both drivers. The Tesseract performance regression is much more severe but again it's an open-source OpenGL test shooting out hundreds of frames per second.
With the demanding Unigine Heaven tech demo, the frame-rate on the GeForce GTX 780 Ti was flat-lined across the tested 2014 proprietary drivers.