Nouveau DRM Commits Supporting Z Compression

Posted by Michael Larabel on October 19, 2012

Ben Skeggs of Red Hat pushed a number of new DRM commits into the Nouveau driver development repository today, including new support for Z compression.

With the commits that landed hours ago in the Nouveau DRM repository, Z compression is now enabled for NV30 and NV40 class NVIDIA graphics processors.

NV20 class hardware already had Z compression support since 2010 but now NV30 and NV40 class hardware has enabled Z compression support. Z compression is the compressing the Z-buffer image depth coordinates to reduce bandwidth on Z reads and writes. Z compression is one of the parts on the AMD side referred to as HyperZ. Both NVIDIA and AMD hardware has supported Z compression hardware for quite some time.

The NV30 class hardware is the GeForce 5/FX series while the NV40 class hardware is the GeForce 6 and GeForce 7 series. The Z compression support may lead to performance improvements for this hardware, but we will have to wait until new Phoronix benchmarks are conducted.

Discuss this article in our forums, IRC channel, or email the author. You can also follow our content via RSS and on social networks like Facebook, Identi.ca, and Twitter (@Phoronix and @MichaelLarabel). Subscribe to Phoronix Premium to view our content without advertisements, view entire articles on a single page, and experience other benefits.
Latest Hardware Reviews
  1. Sumo Lounge Emperor
  2. Gallium3D Continues Improving OpenGL For Older Radeon GPUs
  3. 15-Way Open vs. Closed Source NVIDIA/AMD Linux GPU Comparison
  4. Nouveau vs. NVIDIA Linux Comparison Shows Shortcomings
Latest Software Articles
  1. Intel Linux OpenGL Driver Leading Over Apple OS X
  2. The Cost Of Ubuntu Disk Encryption
  3. Btrfs vs. EXT4 vs. XFS vs. F2FS On Linux 3.10
  4. AMD Radeon R600 GPU LLVM 3.3 Back-End Testing
Latest Linux News
  1. Linux Desktop Security Could Be A Whole Lot Better
  2. KDE 4.11 Will Be The Last Major KDE4 Workspaces Feature Release
  3. New NVIDIA Linux Driver Supports The GeForce GTX 780
  4. Chrome 28 To Offer More Speed Improvements
  5. Digia Announces "Boot To Qt" Project
  6. X.Org Libraries Hit By Round Of Security Issues
  7. Wayland's Weston Gets Output Scaling Support
  8. Raspberry Pi Gets New Wayland Weston Renderer
  9. Debian GNU/Hurd 2013 Release Brings New Packages
  10. Intel Ultrabook Performance Is Faster With Mesa 9.2
  11. Hot Relocation HDD To SSD Support For Btrfs
Latest Forum Talk
  1. Raspberry Pi Gets New Wayland Weston Renderer
  2. Fedora 19 Alpha Gets Its First Delay Due To UEFI
  3. Wayland's Weston Gets Output Scaling Support
  4. KDE 4.11 Will Be The Last Major KDE4 Workspaces...
  5. anyone have vaapi working reliably on sandy...
  6. Chrome 28 To Offer More Speed Improvements
  1. Computers
  2. Display Drivers
  3. Graphics Cards
  4. Motherboards
  5. Peripherals
  6. Processors
  7. Software
  8. Operating Systems
  9. All Articles
  1. Linux Benchmarking
  2. OpenBenchmarking.org
  3. Phoronix Test Suite