Is The Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Fast Enough For Steam On Linux Gaming?

[MoonMoon]

If you want it smooth, lower the resolution or drop the rendering quality. It's as simple as that.

Although I ended up having BF4 at less than 480p so it was playable before I got a GPU. Good times, good times.

If I want it smooth I buy a videocard fast enough to run the game in full quality on my desired resolution. If it can render the game faster than my monitors VSync: good, I have enough power to enable image enhancements like AA and AF. I see your point when you don?t have the money to buy a good videocard, but in that case you better start with running the proprietary driver (at least on Nvidia) instead of reducing quality or resolution.
As I see it the nouveau driver is only good for standard desktop work, but not really suitable for gaming (I wonder if it is possible to benchmark displaying large models in Blender?). Don't get me wrong, the devs really do a good job, especially when it comes to the parts where there is no help at all from Nvidia, but the driver simply is not good enough for now.

[imirkin]

With Nouveau I have random lockups on GNOME 3 since kernel which introduced close to max fan rpm, it's pointless since it runs at half clocks with no load. GF116/NVCF/GTX550Ti. I think it's linux 3.16.

Report bugs that you have via bugs.freedesktop.org ... otherwise they'll never get fixed. IIRC 3.16 got a bit of an upgrade in the types of fans it was able to control. But perhaps the thresholds in your vbios are messed up/are being misread. The only issue I'm aware of with GF116 is that some, but far from all, of the cards appear to be missing their PCOPY1 engine despite having no such indication in the usual "engine disabled" places. You can try booting with "nouveau.config=PCE1=0" to prevent nouveau from trying to use the second copy engine. Could be the reason for the lockups... or could be totally unrelated if you have a working one.

[DMJC]

Wow so much butt hurt entitlement on here. I give it 6-18 months until we have full re-clocking and OpenGL 4.5 working out of the box on all NVIDIA graphics cards. The Nouveau developers are doing a fantastic job and the Intel/ATi developers are also doing a fantastic job of smashing out the extension support. Anyone following these projects closely (actually watching the progress on reclocking and extension support) knows that these things are being very rapidly completed.

[artivision]

We need some 650m and 740m benchmarks, so please Mr. Michael if you can.