Nvidia to Nouveau - can't be happier

I used the proprietary nvidia driver for the last couple of years on my desktop. X server process with nvidia used to grow to over 1GB of resident memory use:

10001 root 20 0 2515m 1.3g 9284 S 4 31.8 310:38.06 X

And here is the same with Nouveau:

2997 root 20 0 84328 28m 13m S 5 0.7 34:49.18 X

28 frigging megabytes! No problems whatsoever so far, with performance or anything else.

This is NV44 (GeForce 7100 GS) card, nvidia 270.41.19, nouveau 0.0.16_pre20110323, xorg-x11 7.4 (server 1.10.2). But really I've had the same memory behavior with a variety of nvidia versions from as far back as I can remember.

All other software and usage patterns are the same. The only difference is the driver.