NVIDIA Linux Beta Rolling Out "G-SYNC Compatible" FreeSync Monitor Support

[pal666]

lol at nvidiots who bought gsync monitors for $200 more

[Britoid]

Yeah!!! This is the problem with NVIDIA... When they do something good, they also always HAVE to compensate it with something bad!

When they decided to support PRIME, it was only for GPU switching, but not something like Optimus.

When they decided to support the Wayland ecosystem, they implemented DRM and KMS, but instead of GBM they went for their own EGLStreams stuff.

GBM isn't part of Wayland, it's part of Mesa. Wayland and EGL never described the way of creating contexts. GBM doesn't work on nVidia's driver for various reasons, they didn't just chose to ignore GBM.

Vulkan does thus Vulkan when the transition happens shouldn't have this problem.

[theriddick]

Not completely sure but this GSYNC doesn't work with Vulkan games in my testing so far....

Its a serious pain to get working when you have dual displays and custom display settings.. lol

Seems pretty sketchy at best, I got it to say NORMAL in one game but all other games said nothing, seems the indicator has rendering issues perhaps. tried POE2, nothing, warthunder vulkan said NORMAL which I think means off. Pfft, the windows experience was 100x better, could enable it in windows even, and it just worked...

What exactly is NVIDIA doing under Linux with GSYNC? trying to make it the worst experience possible? NO WAY would I even both with a gsync monitor after this testing!

[skeevy420]

Maybe the GPU's fan controller is defective, but the fan itself isn't. Does the fan work if you plug it directly into your PSU or motherboard? You can do this if you have any jumper wires lying around. If it is actually dead, maybe you could take take the fan off (but obviously keep the heatsink in place) and ziptie a normal case fan to it. Not the most elegant or effective solution, but it'll hold you over.

Probably the controller since it spins, just not at full power and ramping up sysfs does nothing anymore. I used to push the card hard and had to have the fan at maxed out values to keep it under 90C. It ran really hot from day 1 and always needed higher fan settings than stock. As old as it is, it isn't worth trying to diagnose and fix it. It's been on its last leg for a while now and I'm surprised it's lasted this long.

Opened my case and I'm using a 12" circular fan to hold me over for a week or three until I get a new card.

[varikonniemi]

So they milked their shitty gsync as long as they could, and now after resisting for a while they adopt the standard. Even if they keep the gsync brand it is purely marketing, the technology underneath is freesync/adaptive sync and no dedicated gsync chip will exist.

[GI_Jack]

Between this and the KWin article, NVidia is looking more and more appealing and viable. I'd still rather have an AMD card on principle alone, but there's about to be no technical limitation that would prevent me from using an NVidia card (ZoL keeps me behind a kernel release or two making most NVidia driver + latest kernel issues moot).

I just picked up a pair of RX580s because the price was right and I wanted to test out AMDGPU drivers. Drivers are still a hot mess. While they render perfectly, and nothing breaks, support is dismal. limited availability and support of the PRO drivers. AMD does a shit job making sure latest kernel and Xorg are supported. At least the kernel drivers are Free, which means they have help maintaining them, and they can be compiled for any kernel you want. AMDVLK does work fine, although the entire stack is very slow compared to nvidia.

Oh, and things like fanspeed are not automaticly set, and must be manually set. There is no official tool, just a few third party tools like amdgpu-fan and amdcocv. For what they do, they work well, but like, when you have to monitor your GPU in a terminal window with watch -n1, you have an issue.

Nvidia? just install the blob and it works, not questions asked. Older card? install the older blob, which still gets new updates for new kernels and Xorg.

[Brisse]

GI_Jack AMDGPU-PRO drivers are for enterprise. Those customers don't use latest kernel and x.org, so there's not much reason for AMD to keep up with the bleeding edge there. Most people should use the fully open source drivers provided by your distro. They are officially endorsed by AMD and in most cases perform better and they work well with rolling distros since they are perfectly integrated into the system right out of the box.

Fan speed is automatic of course, and if it's not then you have messed something up or you should report a bug. Most likely though, I think it may be because you have installed PRO driver on an incompatible distro or something. The PRO driver comes with a kernel module (DKMS) which can cause such incompatibilities. Either way, you shouldn't use it. You are supposed to use the upstream kernel driver.

[skeevy420]

GI_Jack AMDGPU-PRO drivers are for enterprise. Those customers don't use latest kernel and x.org, so there's not much reason for AMD to keep up with the bleeding edge there. Most people should use the fully open source drivers provided by your distro. They are officially endorsed by AMD and in most cases perform better and they work well with rolling distros since they are perfectly integrated into the system right out of the box.

Fan speed is automatic of course, and if it's not then you have messed something up or you should report a bug. Most likely though, I think it may be because you have installed PRO driver on an incompatible distro or something. The PRO driver comes with a kernel module (DKMS) which can cause such incompatibilities. Either way, you shouldn't use it. You are supposed to use the upstream kernel driver.

There are some fan issues. In my case, MSI has shitty fan settings at the GPU bios level.

My R7 260x would not go over 50% fan speed, ever, on Linux or Windows and would reach 90C in less than 2 minutes of playing an intensive game, Linux or Windows. I've had to manually adjust my fan speeds since I've owned this card or else it would overheat and throttle very badly. It's almost like MSI expects people to use Afterburner and tweak the hell out of it because their default settings just plain suck for playing games. Even worse, it was the MSI R7 260x OC2 model...a 2nd revision...the OC1 must have had some really horrible defaults...

I've never used the Pro drivers outside of Suse last month (they performed worse than the kernel drivers for what little I tested) and I had the same fan speed problem on Ubuntu, Suse & OpenSuse, Arch, Antergos, Manjaro, Debian, LMDE, Mint Ubuntu, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10 so I know it wasn't necessarily a bad driver or a driver issue since I did the FGLRX to amdgpu transition with this card and have tested it on multiple operating systems over the past half decade.

To update my first post here: I did a bad eBay purchase at the end of last year. If I'm lucky I'll get refunded $60 by the end of the week and I can buy an RX 560...I'd rather have a 590 but $60 only goes so far...

[Brisse]

skeevy420 Yea, that sounds like crappy firmware or just overall a crappy card rather than driver issues. Gives me flashbacks of my previous card, an Asus ROG Matrix R9 290X. Despite being their top of the line AMD card at the time, that thing was a POS (crappy heatsink, loud fans, bad defaults). Eventually swapped it for Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury which I've had for a few years now (even ran two of them during the mining craze) and this thing is great. Comes with sane defaults for fan control and such, and to cite Nvidia's CEO, "It just works!". Don't have to tweak anything on this.

[skeevy420]

skeevy420 Yea, that sounds like crappy firmware or just overall a crappy card rather than driver issues. Gives me flashbacks of my previous card, an Asus ROG Matrix R9 290X. Despite being their top of the line AMD card at the time, that thing was a POS (crappy heatsink, loud fans, bad defaults). Eventually swapped it for Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury which I've had for a few years now (even ran two of them during the mining craze) and this thing is great. Comes with sane defaults for fan control and such, and to cite Nvidia's CEO, "It just works!". Don't have to tweak anything on this.

Outside of the fan issues, it was a damn good card. That said, it was the 2nd MSI card I had to mess with -- I had an MSI Geforce card way back when and it needed the fan ramped up too, though nowhere near as bad. I doubt I'll buy an MSI card ever again.