Nouveau vs. NVIDIA Linux Comparison Shows Shortcomings

[Larian]

Umm....

I bought Nvidia's hardware and use the vendor's Linux driver because I want the best performance possible. Did I do something bad? (I could swear I paid for all this stuff.)

[brosis]

I bought Nvidia's hardware and use the vendor's Linux driver because I want the best performance possible. Did I do something bad? (I could swear I paid for all this stuff.)

Category "bad" is highly subjective and hence unapplicable!

What you did is pay for solution with clear definitions.
Performance over specific LIMITED time and LIMITED features (by means of driver support for specific OSes with single license to use this driver in binary form) as mentioned in Nvidia EULA. Nothing more.

Opensource is CLEARLY MUCH MORE demanding and not covered by your Nvidia agreement.

nouveau driver is running fine on a rare Geforce GTX 460 v2 (Fermi based) for casual use or some hindi games.
It will be a matter of time Nvidia will have no choice but to assist nouveau developer due to competition.

Happens ONLY if you support NON-nvidia now. So...
PS.
Would also be nice if they fire "for-fun" guys straightaway and driver actually stabilizes.
All this "fun" in official Linux results in nothing more but damage to reputation.

[finalzone]

Happens ONLY if you support NON-nvidia now. So...
PS.
Would also be nice if they fire "for-fun" guys straightaway and driver actually stabilizes.
All this "fun" in official Linux results in nothing more but damage to reputation.

Which I do with my AMD E350 powered laptop (running on FOSS driver on daily basis) and active participation of test-day in Fedora Project.

[Kano]

@brosis

uvd/vdpau is not fully compatible to current apps - most likely you did not test it yourself. It works somehow with mplayer/vlc (via vdpau-video wrapper with extra symlink), has problems with flash 11.2 (youtube) when ads are played in front of a hd video, does not support deinterlace and does not work with xbmc at all. But basically it will be very interesting when those issues are resolved - especially for apus or older systems with amd hd 4x00 onboard - those do not even work with fglrx with current xservers anymore. It currently works best using mplayer to play progressive content.

[archibald]

I bought Nvidia's hardware and use the vendor's Linux driver because I want the best performance possible. Did I do something bad? (I could swear I paid for all this stuff.)

Not even slightly: your card = your choice. Other people simply prefer to use open source drivers.

[cbamber85]

I bought Nvidia's hardware and use the vendor's Linux driver because I want the best performance possible. Did I do something bad? (I could swear I paid for all this stuff.)

I too really don't understand why Nouveau exists as a consumer level driver. If you spent good money on a graphics card, why would you then software cripple it? I understand if you are interested in driver development, or graphics card hardware, but the vast majority of people who use nouveau aren't. So what do you get out of Nouveau? It's open-source you say, but unless you plan on developing using it - why do you give a shit!?

I can't see the difference between buying a GTX560 Ti and using Nouveau, and buying a high-end i7 and downclocking it.

[calim]

Subliminal message: "We don't care if this driver works at all"
Resolution: Workaround allows to work around the problem, so people can still work, waiting for a real fix. Ignoring workarounds equals to not caring about anyone who uses the software. Thats a kick in userbase butt.

The subliminal message was more along the lines of "If it doesn't work, fix it !" I'm trying to get people to contribute but they're awfully resistant. Maybe that's not the right way. But then, if everything worked, who would feel the need to ... and having a workaround lowers the pain and hence the incentive to find a proper fix. NOTE: My opinion, not that of the whole nouveau team.

Subliminal message: "We don't care about quality of this driver at all"
Resolution: This is as "hobby" as it gets.

That was just speaking for myself. I do care about the quality, but I'm restricting myself to working on mesa, so I'll rarely fix the kinds of things that need to be done in the kernel. That's the other guy's job. Unless it affects my card then I can't resist.

Subliminal message: "We don't care about Linux user base. They can go to hell."

Well, sometimes I feel like that. When the userbase tell me I'm spending so much free time on something pointless I get angry at them.

Resolution: If someone refuses even to accept free cards in order to make Linux more attractive to new users, he definately gives a brick about Linux userbase.

Accepting cards means accepting responsibility to get them working. I'm having a hard time resisting to work on nouveau and focusing on the things I'm *supposed* to be doing already, if I had users' cards lying around pressuring me to fix them that'd be even harder.

[brent]

calim, to get back to the GT 240 issue - why are you apparently opposed to accepting a workaround? I know that sometimes it's not wise to include hacks, because with a workaround in place there is less pressure to come up with an actual solution. But this has been broken for what now, two years?

[Sonadow]

calim, to get back to the GT 240 issue - why are you apparently opposed to accepting a workaround? I know that sometimes it's not wise to include hacks, because with a workaround in place there is less pressure to come up with an actual solution. But this has been broken for what now, two years?

Just out of curiosity, since I don't have any Nvidia hardware; when you pass nouveau.noaccel=1 to the boot command line does it also end up disabling gnome-shell and forcibly reverting the desktop to fallback mode?

[brent]

Not anymore - typically, llvmpipe will be used.