NVIDIA Fermi/Kepler GPUs Are The Best Bet For Ubuntu 14.04 Nouveau

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA Fermi/Kepler GPUs Are The Best Bet For Ubuntu 14.04 Nouveau

In my testing of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with the Linux 3.13 kernel and Mesa 10.1 for the open-source graphics driver stack provided by Nouveau for NVIDIA GeForce graphics hardware, only the Fermi and Kepler GPUs are running reliably. While these newer NVIDIA GPUs are running stable with Ubuntu 14.04, the performance is still a wreck due to lack of overclocking.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=20125

[Calinou]

the performance is still a wreck due to lack of overclocking.

You mean reclocking, not overclocking. We would like the latter too, though, we don't even have it in the proprietary driver.

Engine reclocking (GPU) is planned for the coming months, but don't expect memory reclocking (VRAM) for at least a year... the PM work is delayed by Maxwell support.

You're calling them a "Best bet" in the title? When we have a 5? faster proprietary driver, which also manages to be more stable?

[Rexilion]

You mean reclocking, not overclocking.

Engine reclocking (GPU) is planned for the coming months, but don't expect memory reclocking (VRAM) for at least a year... the PM work is delayed by Maxwell support.

Ow, that is excellent news.

Maybe it should make more sense to adjust the benchmark results with the clockspeed? I.e. normalize everything to the lowest clock speeds used?

I guess there won't be any reclocking for nv4e ? (i.e. nv40 and lower?)

[smitty3268]

You're calling them a "Best bet" in the title? When we have a 5? faster proprietary driver, which also manages to be more stable?

It seems you missed the end of the title, which is very clear that it's talking only about the nouveau driver only. So the proprietary driver is besides the point.

[dungeon]

The GTX 460, GT 610, and GTX 650 default clock speeds at boot time are extremely low and thus very poor open-source Linux performance.

Dont know how that looks like, but as i see that is not the case at least for GT 610. It is OK i think and is comparabile with nvidia has ~60-70% performance of nvidia blob

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia_geforce_gt610&num=3

[Calinou]

Ow, that is excellent news.

Maybe it should make more sense to adjust the benchmark results with the clockspeed? I.e. normalize everything to the lowest clock speeds used?

I guess there won't be any reclocking for nv4e ? (i.e. nv40 and lower?)

The problems of doing this are:
- it's not representative of the proprietary driver's real performance
- clock-to-clock, the drivers compete, but Nouveau will be slower if it's at the same, higher clock speeds due to the lack of micro-optimisations.


PM work is mostly being done on Fermi and Kepler these days. You could join #nouveau @ irc.freenode.net and ask there to be sure.

[GreatEmerald]

Yea, well, the GPU lockups are still there on my 660. Just that they happen randomly, usually about once per day.

[Spittie]

Strange that you've got problems with the gt220 Michael, works fine here, even with "more demanding" tests such as the Unigine benchmarks (it's slow, but that's expected). kernel 3.14, mesa 10.1 and x.org 1.15.

[imirkin]

Yea, well, the GPU lockups are still there on my 660. Just that they happen randomly, usually about once per day.

See https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63165. You may have better luck with blob pgraph fw.

[imirkin]

Strange that you've got problems with the gt220 Michael, works fine here, even with "more demanding" tests such as the Unigine benchmarks (it's slow, but that's expected). kernel 3.14, mesa 10.1 and x.org 1.15.

Yeah, it all works fine for me too on a 9500 GT (G96) and a Quadro FX 370LP (G98). There are some known issues with GT21x cards that hang on startup (and which never really worked to begin with, so not regressions). AFAIK there are no reported regressions of the type that Michael is talking about, so unless someone steps up to do that, not much that can be done about these claims of things not working. Here's my claim: It all works fine File bugs and prove me wrong.