NVIDIA 396.54.02 Vulkan Beta Driver Brings Some Fixes For DXVK

[eydee]

Nvidia for gaming.

Until you get eye cancer of all the tearing. F. nvidia for still not having proper vsync on Linux. Even Windows 95 had it, without any kind of compositing.

[aufkrawall]

Until you get eye cancer of all the tearing. F. nvidia for still not having proper vsync on Linux. Even Windows 95 had it, without any kind of compositing.

That's not really true. There are quite some nasty Nvidia quirks, but vsync in general works fine.

[bridgman]

What else... I love the nvidia-smi and nvidia-settings programs. I feel like I can actually interact, overclock and control my graphics card. No offense to AMD (or offense, whatever, I paid for that card) but I had to use third party tools and become a phoronix grandmaster to know my AMD card inside/out.

Have you tried roc-smi ?

https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROC-smi

It is aimed primarily at compute users so don't think it currently allows overclocking, but my understanding is that it is still pretty useful.

We may have to give up on distros aligning around a common control panel API and make our own at some point. Every time we talked about control panels we got flamed and told that we should not be introducing our own, but the level of flaming seems to have gone down recently.

[aufkrawall]

@bridgman Imho the amdgpu driver already offers basically everything one would have to "tweak" his or her graphics card since Linux 4.17 and is already much better in this regard than Nvidia.
However, there is still this bug that prevents increasing maximum power consumption as returned by graphics card bios:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=106374

[perpetually high]

Have you tried roc-smi ?

https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROC-smi

It is aimed primarily at compute users so don't think it currently allows overclocking, but my understanding is that it is still pretty useful.

We may have to give up on distros aligning around a common control panel API and make our own at some point. Every time we talked about control panels we got flamed and told that we should not be introducing our own, but the level of flaming seems to have gone down recently.

Good to hear, and always appreciate your input. I actually did use rocm-smi (I'm guessing they renamed it to just roc-smi now) when I was using ROCm for OpenCL and loved it. I missed using it when I had to stop using ROCm, so funny you bring that up.

I think a control panel (really, just a central place) with a friendly GUI would be very helpful and I agree on the difficulties of being dependent on the distros for the common API, because frankly who knows when that happens. I ragged on NVIDIA on Linux a lot (let's ignore proprietary drivers for a second) but it really is a nice experience also so I couldn't in good conscience not say that NVIDIA on Linux might be a more fulfilling experience, at the moment at least. Overclocking was way easier, for example. But I'm excited for where things are going and think things are only going to get more polished on Linux.

[perpetually high]

@bridgman Imho the amdgpu driver already offers basically everything one would have to "tweak" his or her graphics card since Linux 4.17 and is already much better in this regard than Nvidia.
However, there is still this bug that prevents increasing maximum power consumption as returned by graphics card bios:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=106374

Not when it comes to overclocking. OCing on Linux with NVIDIA is a much better experience right now. It requires you to enable the Coolbits option in xorg.conf, and then you're good to go with the nvidia-settings (GUI) or nvidia-smi (CLI).

To show the smi and control panel, here's a quick gif. (full version)

[aufkrawall]

Why would overclocking by any better with Nvidia? You can easily adjust clocks via amdgpu and, unlike with Nvidia, even voltages:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Improving_performance#Overclocking_with_amdgpu

[perpetually high]

Look, overclocking is overclocking. I'm talking about ease of use and all that jazz. I didn't like the percentage overclocking method with pp_od_mclk either. I wanted to just adjust the offsets of core and mem. If it works for you, then great but I won't argue for the sake of arguing.

[aufkrawall]

Since 4.17, you can (must) define absolute clock values.

[perpetually high]

Since 4.17, you can (must) define absolute clock values.

"Since Linux 4.17, it is possible to adjust clocks and voltages of the graphics card via /sys/class/drm/card0/device/pp_od_clk_voltage. It is however required to unlock access to it in sysfs by appending the boot parameter amdgpu.ppfeaturemask=0xffffffff"

Good to know. It's still excessive for a boot parameter to get oc going. I think the Coolbits xorg.conf tweak makes more sense (though that can be confusing in its own way at first), and then from there you can use nvidia-smi CLI to set the clocks, power limit, whatever for your scripts, and then the system panel in case you need GUI overview. Either way, I wasn't aware about this method so thanks for the heads up. I was using ohgodatool to do all my overclocking but that stopped working when 4.18 came out, and that was around the time I picked up the new card so I didn't look too into it.

For the record, I'm a big fan of AMD and I still have my RX 480 (looking for an excuse to build a second rig), but what NVIDIA has right now on Linux is also impressive and I hope AMD will dedicate the resources soon to bring that on Linux as well. And from the sounds of what bridgman is saying, we're in good hands and he's doing what he can to continue to improve that effort.