Open-Source "Nouveau" Driver Now Supports NVIDIA Ampere - But Without 3D Acceleration

[marios]

You know what I love? I just bought a Gigabyte RTX 3090 a few weeks ago... and when I booted into Linux it just worked! And it works amazingly well

You can keep your AMD open source driver (which apparently is also crappy, if you want to go all the way you have to use the AMD Pro closed source driver... but I have a 3090 that works so I wouldn't know about AMD issues).

Unfortunately this is a bit embarrassing, but the 3090 GPU i have actually has more memory then my system... so at best I can push the card to 50% capacity (and I have tried!) so it is a beast!

But man booting into Linux and having the attached Samsung Odyssey G9 come alive on the 3090 with no issues is pure nerdvana!!!!

Keep your AMD FOSS GPU... I will stick with the one that crushes it and gives me all the performance I paid for

(now that said, when I get the AMD Zen 3 system built to actually drive this card and dump my functional but painful i5 I will be in the next level of nerdvana).

0. Do you have any proof that the oss AMD driver is crappy?
1. Works amazingly well? Lol, a few months ago, it required an outdated kernel.
2. How do you get the performance you paid for? Can you give me some vulkan (or opengl at least) benchmark results where you get on Linux at least windows performance? If you manage that, I would like to see your configuration, because for me nvidia's performance on Linux sucks hard.

[oiaohm]

There is no need to resort to the childlike posturing, put Wayland or Xorg in front of pretty much any common computer user and they will have no clue the difference.

That is not in fact true. There are stability issues and rendering issues that supporting what Wayland requires fixing yes your any common computer user does notice the difference when they have both in front of them.

Unfortunately this is a bit embarrassing, but the 3090 GPU i have actually has more memory then my system... so at best I can push the card to 50% capacity (and I have tried!) so it is a beast!

This here is a Nvidia driver quirk I have put a 8G AMD card in 4Gand 2G of ram systems the result is you can do rendering tasks like games that will use the 8G of the gpu.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Swap_on_video_RAM

Yes this above is another thing we cannot do with the Nvidia closed source driver is use the slram to allow swap to be placed in the gpu ram instead of on storage media somewhere. AMD GPU with more ram than the system is well and truly usable.

https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/linux-mint-with-latest-nvidia-drivers-and-4k-monitor-only-with-30hz/108845

4k issues don't only apply to AMD cards with Linux.

The reality here is when Nvidia finally supports Wayland they should have had to fix up their drivers poor design so fixing up the stability of X11 with Nvidia drivers as well. Remember the security faults that hit nvidia were only documented in the open source drivers in 2013. One of the first things when you have install AMD cards and run Linux has been increased stability compared to when using Nvidia cards this difference is caused by one driver supporting Wayland being the AMD one and the Nvidia not because supporting Wayland required fixing set of issues that does directly effect the end user.

[nadro]

@zexelon
I had a lot of AMD cards last years and OSS drivers worked great (my latest GPU is Radeon RX 5600 XT), so don't tell those bullshits. I think that you don't ever had any AMD card in your system in last couple of years and you are're just a troll.

[Alexmitter]

I really wonder from what standpoint all the nvidia fanboys here come from.
I have a 1060, a VII and a RX 560 in my at work workstation. Imagine which of those cards is nothing but pain.
Showing a friend of mine the joy of linux, the only problem was him having a 1080 Ti, it resulted in nothing but pain and that with Ubuntu, the supposed nvidia out of the box distro.
Putting that damn RX 560 in that workstation was a life changer because it f*ing works, I had not to bother about the GPU once in a year of tracking the newest kernel releases and getting some work done.

And just thinking about the amount of code every single desktop on our platform that had to incorporate hacky tricks to get the desktop working properly on Nvidias own driver. No matter if you use Gnome, KDE, XFCE, Mate. This affects us all.

Edit: This is not even about Nvidia vs AMD. No matter if you have a Intel, AMD, Mali, Adreno, VideoCore and many more, it just works. The only two odd ones out are Nvidia and PowerVR.

[OneTimeShot]

Well... the last time I tried the Nvidia proprietary driver, it hung frequently and eventually that corrupted my HDD so I switched to Nouveau (Fedora). I don't need much in life - just make the desktop appear.

These days, I only use whatever OSS drivers are available. AMD runs 4k 60Hz just fine (as if thats an uncommon scenario), Nouveau is ok on desktops but I binned Nvidia laptops as a lost cause.

Let's face it, "allowing" closed source drivers in what was meant to be a GPL kernel was always a mistake... The kernel should self check and shutdown if it finds code that wasn't present at compile time.

[iewuavix]

Well... the last time I tried the Nvidia proprietary driver, it hung frequently and eventually that corrupted my HDD so I switched to Nouveau (Fedora). I don't need much in life - just make the desktop appear.

These days, I only use whatever OSS drivers are available. AMD runs 4k 60Hz just fine (as if thats an uncommon scenario), Nouveau is ok on desktops but I binned Nvidia laptops as a lost cause.

Let's face it, "allowing" closed source drivers in what was meant to be a GPL kernel was always a mistake... The kernel should self check and shutdown if it finds code that wasn't present at compile time.

If you don't want to use closed source drivers, don't. Nothing is forcing you to buy Nvidia, I don't. Any such restriction would just be patched out by most vendors, and really there is no way for the kernel to know the license of a module it loads.

[oiaohm]

These days, I only use whatever OSS drivers are available. AMD runs 4k 60Hz just fine (as if thats an uncommon scenario), Nouveau is ok on desktops but I binned Nvidia laptops as a lost cause.

This is a little in correct. 4k60hz be it a raspberry pi, Intel, Nvidia or AMD its a problem child where defects show themselves.

Yes you have people complaining both ways that Linux is able to do 4k60hz when windows can only do 30 and Windows is able to do 4k60 and Linux is only able to 30.

Causes 1 thing but there is two parts to it first part is why windows and linux appear different the second part is what the fault is,.
1) Differences in power management between Windows and Linux on the GPU results in different signal quality on the ports of the GPU. This is generic hell this results in either Windows works or Linux works and the other one does not. This one can at times be confirmed by locking the cards performance settings the same on Windows and Linux then magically getting the same results all time but that has not fixed the true cause.
2) Minor defects in cables and soldering on cards show up when you are in 4k60hz mode. This is why you have users with the same model cards where one claims 4k60hz works fine for them and another where its broken. Yes these faults can be over come by right level of power when you have windows or linux working and the other not. Please note more power does not equal better in all cases either more power can equal more noise so equal poor signal so no 4k60hz and not enough power to over come the defect also equals no 4k60hz..

So OneTimeShot you have a good card its fine. But there are a lot of users who don't luck out with a good card be it AMD or Nvidia. Yes you get people who say Nvidia suxs at 4k60Hz as well and AMD is great because they got a broken Nvidia card. Be it AMD or Nvidia you start attempting 4k60Hz you quickly find out how good your cables and card and monitor really is in construction quality sometimes the card you have is not the construction quality you would prefer other times its the cables other times it the monitor port wiggled the right way because that broken.

[Alexmitter]

This is a little in correct. 4k60hz be it a raspberry pi, Intel, Nvidia or AMD its a problem child where defects show themselves.

Yes you have people complaining both ways that Linux is able to do 4k60hz when windows can only do 30 and Windows is able to do 4k60 and Linux is only able to 30.

Causes 1 thing but there is two parts to it first part is why windows and linux appear different the second part is what the fault is,.
1) Differences in power management between Windows and Linux on the GPU results in different signal quality on the ports of the GPU. This is generic hell this results in either Windows works or Linux works and the other one does not. This one can at times be confirmed by locking the cards performance settings the same on Windows and Linux then magically getting the same results all time but that has not fixed the true cause.
2) Minor defects in cables and soldering on cards show up when you are in 4k60hz mode. This is why you have users with the same model cards where one claims 4k60hz works fine for them and another where its broken. Yes these faults can be over come by right level of power when you have windows or linux working and the other not. Please note more power does not equal better in all cases either more power can equal more noise so equal poor signal so no 4k60hz and not enough power to over come the defect also equals no 4k60hz..

So OneTimeShot you have a good card its fine. But there are a lot of users who don't luck out with a good card be it AMD or Nvidia. Yes you get people who say Nvidia suxs at 4k60Hz as well and AMD is great because they got a broken Nvidia card. Be it AMD or Nvidia you start attempting 4k60Hz you quickly find out how good your cables and card and monitor really is in construction quality sometimes the card you have is not the construction quality you would prefer other times its the cables other times it the monitor port wiggled the right way because that broken.

It was truly hard to read through this. Put more effort in your writing.

But lets address the elephant in the room.

- Power management does effect signal quality? Signal quality of a digital signal, 1s and 0s. Are you trying to drive your 4k panel with VGA or composit?

- Soldering also does not effect a digital signal quality as long as pins are connected.

If there is one thing that may effect your digital signal quality, its bad cables and bad termination.

[CochainComplex]

Yeah, I'm going to buy the newest NVIDIA graphics cards... to use nouveau. Lmao

As long as NVIDIA's proprietary driver supports it, what's the problem? All the mainstream distros have easy installs for NVIDIA's driver.



You know what's nice? Not having my 4K display flicker and artifact randomly. 4K@60Hz over HDMI is flawed on AMD Polaris (and according to other reports, even on RDNA), and AMD nor vendors want to admit it. Worked fine on the GTX 1060 I had for a bit though.

With Nvidia driver you have to deal very often with: kernel too new, GCC too new, tainted kernel, RT Kernel not compatible, Wayland gives issues,... Obviously you are not a linux power user otherwise you would face one or another once in a while. Especially if you use a rolling distro like Clear Linux. Nvidia drivers forced me to fix one of the above mentioned issues every 2 weeks.

[s_j_newbury]

You know what's nice? Not having my 4K display flicker and artifact randomly. 4K@60Hz over HDMI is flawed on AMD Polaris (and according to other reports, even on RDNA), and AMD nor vendors want to admit it. Worked fine on the GTX 1060 I had for a bit though.

I'm on POLARIS, I run at 4K@60Hz over HDMI and it works great. If you were complaining about the lack of FreeSync over HDMI I would agree, since it's a big gripe of mine. If you have a card that flickers or particularly artifacts randomly it's probably faulty. Faults on GPU cards isn't exactly unusual, but isn't really down to AMD, in fact my card actually died not long after I bought it from ebay, so I reflowed it, and now it works perfectly.