Kepler: Nouveau Is ~20% The Speed Of NVIDIA's Blob

[rudregues]

"Nouveau's DPM"

The point is to compare clock for clock perfomance, which was done last year, where Nouveau almost perfomed the same as the binary drivers.
This almost provides an idea of how well Nouveau would perform if it was capable of reclocking, compared to the nVidia's drivers.

What about the released NVIDIA hardware documentation? They can use it for implement reclock capabilities in Nouveau, right?
After this, I think, these benchmarks will be far more interesting! :-)

[UraniumDeer]

What about the released NVIDIA hardware documentation? They can use it for implement reclock capabilities in Nouveau, right?
After this, I think, these benchmarks will be far more interesting! :-)

Sadly, no.
The documentation released at this point is really limited. To my knowledge, they have released documentation 2 times, where I can't remember what the first bit of info was, but the most recent, is about a developer setting in the GK104 BIOS.
nVidia said that the documentation about reclocking is most likely one of the bits of documentation that's hardest for them to release, though it's most likely the most wanted piece of documentation.

[DeepDayze]

Sadly, no.
The documentation released at this point is really limited. To my knowledge, they have released documentation 2 times, where I can't remember what the first bit of info was, but the most recent, is about a developer setting in the GK104 BIOS.
nVidia said that the documentation about reclocking is most likely one of the bits of documentation that's hardest for them to release, though it's most likely the most wanted piece of documentation.

Yes, as much of the RE work for Nouveau has already been done and reclocking is the last major hurdle towards getting the driver on par with the binary blob, so the documentation covering the reclocking mechanism is what the Nouveau devs quite badly want now. Most likely the reclocking stuff's encumbered with 3rd party IP which is holding up releasing that information now. As it takes a lot of time and care in going through all that documentation it will be quite some time before NVIDIA will be cleared to release that stuff.

[Luke]

Modern cards can handle the desktop even with crippled clocks

In fact it doesn't matter, and even I was criticizing Phoronix for many benchmarks, this time it doesn't matter. Because for an user makes little difference when the driver is so crippled. It may be good to know that it uses less watts and it has "just" 60% of the "native" binary closed driver, but in the meantime it makes most of things you will use, like Gnome Shell (or KDE4) and your game playing not practical. Isn't it so?

I tested Nouveau with both the GT520 and the GTS450, in both cases a gnome-shell or cinnamon desktop worked fine. Before AMD released the power management code for the Radeon driver (from Catalyst), I used to set my main card, a Radeon HD5750 to minimum clocks for most use to save power, about a 100 MHZ clock rate or so. That pushed the clocks down far more than Nouveau's boot clock situation usually does, and the desktop worked fine, as did most video playback in XV. It was turned back up by a panel applet for running games or some "difficult" 1080p videos.

In other words, if a driver has to be good enough for any distro to boot to gnome-shell, cinnamon, or Unity on any card I have in my posession, both Radeon and Nouveau are there right now, at least for all but one of the 7 video cards I have around(4 Nvidia, 3AMD).

As I recall, Red Hat said back in 2011 that before they could use GNOME 3 as a default, Nouveau had to be able to run it. It took quite a while for Nouveau to overcome the firmware situation for the GT520 to run an openGL desktop, but in my last tests that was cleared up. Only my ancient Nvidia 6600LE has trouble with gnome-shell based desktops on Nouveau, and that's only because that card is too old to run any kind of speed on a driver written for cards two generations newer than it. OpenGL works and the desktop will open, but on that card it is very slow, Old school compiz actually worked well enough to use on that same card with Nouveau, interestingly enough.

Hell, as of a couple months ago even the Scorched3d game will pull a playable frame rate (about 30fps) in Nouveau on the GTS450 in my testing-and it would pull 11 to 18 on that card as far back as June 2012. No, I would not advise anyone to buy Nvidia cards new for gaming on open drivers, but on the other hand those intending to use blob drivers are generally advised to avoid AMD. In the long run, Nvidia could end up releasing a "firmware" blob just to handle power management, so at least the rest of the open driver could handle serious use beyond the office desktop level. I'd rather see them do a code drop like AMD did, but if the lawyers stop them I would rather see a firmware blob just big enough for power management than nothing.