NVIDIA 510.39.01 Linux Beta Brings Vulkan Dynamic Rendering, AV1 VDPAU Decode & More

[Volta]

Let's sum nvidia up:

- blurry DLSS that sometimes loses to generic FSR when comes to performance,
- thievingly expensive,
- binary blob POS out of kernel drivers,
- the most annoying and brainwashed fanboys

[tildearrow]

Let's sum nvidia up:

- blurry DLSS that sometimes loses to generic FSR when comes to performance,

Depends on scene. Sometimes DLSS performs better; sometimes FSR performs better.

- thievingly expensive,

Not entirely NVIDIA's fault, unless you mean the Quadro cards, which in that case your statement is true.

- binary blob POS out of kernel drivers,

While true, AMD isn't better at all as Mesa is like lottery. Sometimes it will run amazing, but sometimes it will have issues, hangs and crashes.

- the most annoying and brainwashed fanboys

Redacted

[aufkrawall]

This driver doesn't seem to improve any of the annoying issues I have with Nvidia. Not even VRR LFC works correctly, the transition causes stutter (whereas it doesn't on Windows).

It's really most funny how some people bash DLSS quality even over FSR. When you don't notice what pile of garbage FSR is in comparison, you're eyes must be somewhere where it anatomically doesn't make any sense (if you know what I mean).

[Random_Jerk]

Forget AV1 Decode, but is there a way to get VDPAU working with VP9 decode on Nvidia 20xx/30xx cards on Chromium based browsers? I always seem to not be able to get it to work.

[aufkrawall]

Forget AV1 Decode, but is there a way to get VDPAU working with VP9 decode on Nvidia 20xx/30xx cards on Chromium based browsers? I always seem to not be able to get it to work.

It remains a mystery why Nvidia still pursues VDPAU, which is tied to Xorg and (in practice) to 8 bit video. It is pretty much (un)dead, imho don't expect it to become useful again.

[Bosnux]

So is it possible to adjust gamma ramp in Wayland session with this driver?

This is literally the only thing holding me off from trying to use Wayland. I can deal with crashes and bugs but no Night Colour is just painful.

[Quackdoc]

I think everyone is.

I for one enjoy the romance drama

[bug77]

It remains a mystery why Nvidia still pursues VDPAU, which is tied to Xorg and (in practice) to 8 bit video. It is pretty much (un)dead, imho don't expect it to become useful again.

They don't pursue VDPAU, they just keep it in shape, apparently. They pursue NVDEC now.

[bple2137]

I made another attempt at running GNOME Wayland with this driver. So far I see a bit of improvement as well as regressions. I don't know who is responsible for what and there were some GNOME updates along the way, so maybe something's fixed on the compositor/shell/toolkit side, I don't know.

The video memory leak seems to be gone
There was an issue that caused video memory leakage. After launching few apps, it wasn't fully freed to the point it was rendered unusable (i.e game running as a slideshow). I don't see that now after few hours of testing.

Games kind of work
I tried Red Dead Redemption 2 to see if it stopped crashing with those Vulkan improvements. It didn't. It worked fine (with some quirks) on my old Polaris GPU.
Generally games are running with good performance (about the same as on X11 session), but the frame presentation is not ideal. When a game goes bellow said 60FPS, there is some significant stuttering. Overall games are perfectly playable, but that's still annoying. I remember the issue on AMD too, but it was improved in Mesa (I believe).

The desktop is far less sluggish on Wayland
Even though I upgraded my GPU few generations forward and it gave me a bit of a boost on games side, I feel like it's downgrade to the desktop experience when switching from AMD. Previously I could run a single Wayland session for days straight and it was in general smooth (apart from some GNOME animations that never was and probably never will be smooth no matter what hardware you get). No stutter when scrolling web pages, no stutter while moving windows around, no matter how long it was running and no matter how many games I launched.

Now on X11 with NVIDIA I get severe issues when trying to deal with multiple screens at once. I actually surrendered and I just use one screen at the time (the second one is only a projector TV that I use to play games on couch or watch content from PC). Just both screens running at the same time causes lots of periodical stuttering (getting mouse moving in like 10 fps). I don't know why, I wish I wouldn't have to wonder why, I tried various different nvidia-settings toggles, and even generated and tweaked xorg.conf.d config - what am I in 2010 again?

Heck even when using only a single monitor it's not perfect. It just freaking stutters. There is the ForceFullPipelineCache workaround that is suppose to make the experience even tolerable and that's a choice between screen tearing even using simple desktop software, and skipping frames that didn't make it to be there on time (at least that's what I imagine it is).

There are no such problems on Wayland though, even with the incomplete beta driver. I'm running both screens, jumping out and back into a game and the compositing doesn't seem to care all that much, even the game is smooth in the window preview. On X11, oh boy, the GNOME's overview is 15 fps tops when running a game. That's like actually the newer design capabilities showing some improvements, which is great.

Even though it's far better than X11 session in terms of actual smoothness, it lags behind AMD quite a bit.

Oh, Electron apps are now only showing black windows when running in Xwayland
Some sort of regression I think? I believe it was fine on 495.xx. Although I have no idea if it's GNOME thing, or NVIDIA thing or Chromium or Electron. The only error message in the output is regarding libva driver.

Screen capture with OBS no longer works
It worked before with the Flatpak version of OBS. It was slow, though.

Robustness?
Lots of people are claiming that Wayland session is the worst idea because of compositor crashing. X11 on the other hand is rock solid, well tested and simply cannot crash. Ever.
NVIDIA does its best to cover that! For me X11 crashes taking everything I had opened down. Just yesterday I installed Bitwig Studio from Flatpak and launching it causes crash every single time. Guess what, it works with Xwayland just fine! I'm actually amazed that the app rescales the interface automatically when moved to the HiDPI display and it's an X11 app. Nice! I
haven't investigated what's the issue with running it on X11 is, but I believe running an app shouldn't cause the entire X server session go down. If it'll keep crashing I'll investigate further and report the problem. It reminds me a lot of old days when I was using something like Ubuntu 8.04 and sometimes such crashes were occurring, ah nostalgia.
There was also something else causing the same sort of crash, but I wasn't able to reproduce it and I'm not sure what it was exactly.
Keep in mind I'm talking stable NVIDIA driver releases here.

When I was using AMD, no matter what kind of session, it was stable. I've never seen Mutter going down on Wayland, and I was using it daily for 8 months. Crash recovery would be a good thing to have just in case something goes wrong.

Was it a good idea to buy a NVIDIA GPU?
No. It sucks. I didn't touch any NVIDIA hardware for a decade after I ditched my old PC around 2012. Once I helped a friend to get PRIME going on his laptop and it wasn't pleasant experience. The support for NVIDIA hardware is worse than it remember it back in 2007. It was problematic to install, but it was running fine when configured properly. Now it's easy to install, but the experience with GNOME or KDE Plasma is just terrible. So NVIDIA...

[ryanrsmith]

Hopefully they will soon get dynamic Boost working on Linux.

I'm stuck with windows untill they do. By 3070 can use 140w on windows but only 115w on Linux