[jrabone]

Most likely not performance as in rendering performance, but as in power saving; wasn't this also NVIDIA's reason for not releasing specs to Linux developers?

I actually have some sympathy with a hardware company in this position; if all your competitive advantage is in actually in software, open source is a tricky proposition. Nobody cares about the driver interface to the rendering pipeline any more - I imagine it's heavily dictated by the need to make open standards fast (eg. OpenGL). Power saving? That's a whole different ballgame.

It's a real pain that there are no useful standards for power saving - I've had to disable almost all of the cool processor features on my DAW (C-states, core parking, EIST) because they completely wreck real-time audio latencies, and cause clicks and glitches in DAW software (using external FireWire audio hardware). I notice that Cubase on Windows 7 dynamically installs a different power saving profile on startup, but presumably that means running it as Administrator, and we're back to the bad old days of running as root everywhere.