Only for values of "outperform" which are selective in which frame rates they measure, and take absolutely no account of power consumption on laptops.

I wish it weren't so, and it's nobody's fault but the vendors', but the open source drivers are not clearly better in every way

You misread his comment, the closed source drivers outperform.

The advantage of the open source drivers is they are hassle free. They never piss you off by finding new and creative ways to wreck your system and leave you in a bind. For I suspect most linux users, that is the most important factor, not squeezing every last FPS out of your GPU and every last minute out of your battery.

Intel GPU really is the way to go for linux though. No hassle and more or less the sort of performance you would expect from the same chip on other OSes: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel_snb...

I agree. I've been using NVidia hardware for the better part of the last decade and switched to Intel HD4000 graphics sometime last year. The experience is really refreshing. Stuff works and I don't have to screw around with the binary drivers. The performance is also acceptable for light gaming. It is definately much slower than the GTX NVidia card I have in my big bulky box that's gathering dust but it fits comfortably in the laptop without making it a cooking oven.

For the past 12 years, the only thing I've had to do to get the nVidia driver working again after an upgrade was a reboot. It doesn't wreck the system and it still works better than its AMD/ATi counterparts.

At least nouveau is not yet feature-complete. For example, it cannot handle multiple screens, which means you cannot attach a beamer to your laptop.