The X.Org Foundation Is Funding Work To Improve Nouveau Re-Clocking

[nanonyme]

It's a better idea to not put people with NVIDIA graphic cards ?on the side of the road?. Supporting a proprietary format is fine, see LibreOffice or GIMP supporting .doc or .psd more or less well. It's much better than using the proprietary software.

Yeah but eg re-clocking is afaik something that AMD invested a lot of time and money to get for opensource drivers. Some manager *might* interpret that as no point investing because X.org Foundation will invest in competitors to get similar functionality anyway.

[Luke]

This should bring Nouveau to parity with r600

I think it was last summer that I tested the Radeon HD6750 and the GTS450 back to back on open drivers, and got performance roughly in proportion to clock speed in Scorched3d and in Critter. Scorched3d performance had risen from maybe 11-15 fps to about 33, and I was only getting 50-60 with the AMD card on max clocks. This was with no reclocking on the Nvidia card, something that had patially worked in 2011 but with a minimal effect on performance due to the lack of memory reclocking.

That GTS450, BTW is a good card for Nouveau as it stands. It's boot clocks are around 450 MHZ, making an used one bought cheap the equivalent of a smaller card running at higher clocks in both power use and performance. Mine never got over 40C in Nouveau, even with a resistor slowing down the fan to keep it quiet. The larger cards reportedly have far worse performance issues, due to lower boot clocks. I've never owned one of the larger cards, however.

Honestly no game I was using last Summer would I see any difference between it and my good radeon if I did not call the fps display. Scorched3 now has some bigger maps that can bog down the Radeon, however, so this has presumably changed. Also, for some reason that Nvidia card, on Nouveau and only on Nouveau outperformed every other card/driver combo I tried on Kdenlive video editing timeline playback. It handled transitions with almost no lag, even the heaviest of them.

Don't write off Nouveau: if this reclocking work is sucessful we will have 4 times as many good Linux graphics cards in existing circulation, as Nvidia is reported to sell about 3x as many cards as AMD. We will have four first rate drivers: Intel, Nouveau, R600, and RadeonSI, covering almost all x86 compatable hardware made since 2008.

[chinoto]

I have two 9600GTs, I'd be willing to donate one (or both if that's somehow useful). Just give me an address and some way to feel it's legitimate.
They are specifically this model: http://www3.pny.com/font-color999999...P2575C396.aspx

[strcat]

Both AMD and Intel are actually hostile to free/libre software, outside of the graphics area.

Intel contributes to quite a few open-source projects, and that includes being one of the top contributors to the Linux kernel. I'm not sure what kind of mental gymnastics you're doing to classify them as hostile to open-source.

[chinoto]

Intel contributes to quite a few open-source projects, and that includes being one of the top contributors to the Linux kernel. I'm not sure what kind of mental gymnastics you're doing to classify them as hostile to open-source.

His comment was so stupid I ended up passively ignoring it... Just a couple AMD contributions if their own word isn't good enough:

http://developer.amd.com/community/blog/2013/08/13/amd-releases-appml-source-code-creates-clmath-library/

http://www.datamation.com/applications/libreoffice-accelerates-open-source-spreadsheets-thanks-to-amd.html

"their own word": http://developer.amd.com/tools-and-sdks/open-source/

[chrisb]

Yeah but eg re-clocking is afaik something that AMD invested a lot of time and money to get for opensource drivers. Some manager *might* interpret that as no point investing because X.org Foundation will invest in competitors to get similar functionality anyway.

But will the quality of a limited time reverse-engineered effort be as good as an implementation written by a full-time developer who has engineering documentation of the GPU?

And when, in 12/18 months time, this work finally gets compiled and distributed to a wider audience as part of some distribution's release schedule, who will deal with the bugs and issues that inevitably arise when the code is run on thousands of different hardware combinations that have never before been tested?

I'm not saying this is a particularly bad idea, I'm just saying that, given the choice between 12 weeks of reverse engineering, or a profesional full-time developer with hardware documentation, the latter is likely to be more effective. It should not be hard for a manager to comprehend that concept.

[curaga]

You severely overestimate the average manager...

[Dukenukemx]

It'd be nice if noveau was equally as good as the radeon or intel drivers, but honestly I don't really care, because the closed source drivers are more than good enough if you care about gaming. For me, as long as the hardware performs the way it should (or close enough) and if I don't have to pay extra to make them work then I'm satisfied. With AMD the situation is a little different - their catalyst drivers aren't that great, so its nice having an alternative that is quickly improving. It feels like the radeon driver progression has been slowing down a bit but I have a good feeling that they're working on something big. They've got a good team.

The whole point of open source drivers is so we can get to the point where we don't need to rely on vendors for fixes and features. One of the noveau developers plans to continue his work on the DX9 state tracker. A feature that could bridge the gaming gap between Linux and Windows. As great as Wine is, it does rob your PC of performance compared to Windows. This is a feature that will never have a chance in Nvidia drivers.

[schmidtbag]

The whole point of open source drivers is so we can get to the point where we don't need to rely on vendors for fixes and features. One of the noveau developers plans to continue his work on the DX9 state tracker. A feature that could bridge the gaming gap between Linux and Windows. As great as Wine is, it does rob your PC of performance compared to Windows. This is a feature that will never have a chance in Nvidia drivers.

There are a lot more reasons to want open source drivers than what you mentioned, so I'm definitely all in favor of having the option to leave behind the nvidia drivers. But what many people forget is, at least when it comes to nvidia, part of what you're paying for are the drivers. You (mostly) get the IMMEDIATE full spectrum of support that your OS needs and if anything goes wrong, you have someone to blame, which nvidia becomes obligated to fix. In other words, for the most part, you KNOW what to expect, and companies care about consistent proven results. Nvidia is rightfully a very proud company, and has a larger ego than most. That being said, they're not the kind of company that does things the way other people want them to simply because that's how everyone else does it. Nvidia may piss off people like Xorg devs, Wayland devs, or kernel devs (Linus in particular), but nvidia has the results to back up their decisions. If this were AMD we're talking about, they don't have the results, and perhaps this is why they actually invest in open source. Also, by open sourcing their drivers, nvidia puts themselves at risk where the community could tweak the drivers and taint their name. Nvidia then gets pummeled with questions toward something they have nothing to do with.