Nouveau Re-Clocking Is Way Faster, Shows Much Progress For Open-Source NVIDIA

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 20 June 2014 at 05:00 AM EDT. Page 1 of 5. 32 Comments.

Earlier this week on Phoronix we covered the steps to trying out Nouveau re-clocking with Linux 3.16, assuming you're running a supported NVIDIA GPU that can currently be statically re-clocked using this reverse-engineered graphics driver. While the support is still experimental and isn't intended for end-users, here are some fresh benchmarks of the Nouveau driver DRM code for Linux 3.16 when re-clocked.

The how-to for playing with re-clocking and the requirements for this Nouveau feature of the Linux 3.16 kernel is covered in the previous article. For today's work, I ran some benchmarks of several NVIDIA GeForce 600/700 (Kepler) graphics cards. As covered in that earlier article, the re-clocking is currently static and the user must define the performance state they wish to run their graphics card at for the GPU core and video memory clock frequencies.

With each of the tested graphics cards, I attempted to run them at their default/stock state (generally it's the lowest performance state exposed) and then every other available performance state. All of the graphics cards were successful in at least their "0a" performance state that tended to be a mid-range frequency. However, most graphics cards would lock-up or immediately see screen corruption when aiming for the higher-performance "0e" or "0f" performance states with "0f" being the actual card-rated frequencies. The only Kepler graphics cards tested with the drm-next code that would work were the GTX 650 and GT 740 Super Clocked graphics cards.

The graphics cards that were tested included the:

- GeForce GTX 650
- GeForce GTX 680
- GeForce GT 740 SC
- GeForce GTX 760
- GeForce GTX 770
- GeForce GTX TITAN


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