The Initial Performance Of NVIDIA's R515 Open-Source Linux GPU Kernel Driver

[oleid]

Selfishly I was really hoping the new driver would cover back to Maxwell. Cheap but still excellent used Haswell / Broadwell (LGA 2011-v3) workstations are very easy to find with decent Maxwell GPUs. A M2000 is only a bit slower than my old Radeon 7870 GHz Edition, has double the VRAM at 4GB, and can do 4x 4k60 while being a single slot bus powered card. AMD wasn't as competitive back then, and it's probably a > 20:1 ratio to find Quadros in these systems vs. FirePros.

Even if it was backported, you'd be lacking userspace support. Maybe nouveau could pull that off, but I wouldn't be holding my breath.

[dragon321]

Pretty nice results, especially for new and alpha quality driver. When there will be open source user space then it will make pretty interesting benchmark.

[bug77]

The list of supported cards includes the 10-series cards (https://www.nvidia.com/download/driv...x/187826/en-us) even down to the 700 series cards.

My understanding is, while the 515 driver supports all those cards, you won't be offered the option to use the open source driver unless you're on Turing or Ampere.

[sarmad]

Very nice start.

[dimko]

Now if only we could have HDR on Linux...

[rmfx]

Nice, this is what was expected.
Now that they finally opened their drivers, I hope they will start to play well with open source standards too.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

Well.. it seems that this is a poison pill?



https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/...fSI-UPVHcXFHoQ

No. Just no.

https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2022/05/11/why-is-the-open-source-driver-release-from-nvidia-so-important-for-linux/

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

My understanding is, while the 515 driver supports all those cards, you won't be offered the option to use the open source driver unless you're on Turing or Ampere.

Correct. Kepler ended with the 470 branch which is a LTSB with bug fix support into 2024. Maxwell 1.0 and newer are supported by the current production branch of the closed source binary driver. Only Turing / Ampere and beyond will be supported by the new open source driver.

[Ivan Dimitrov]

Hi, does anybody knows what is the status of the video encoding/decoding? Will this new driver change the crap situation with streaming video playback in Linux?

[bug77]

Hi, does anybody knows what is the status of the video encoding/decoding? Will this new driver change the crap situation with streaming video playback in Linux?

Whatever streaming issues you may have, they're not because of poor drivers, but because of poor implementations. Linux drivers are plenty capable of handling video. Iirc, anything up to h265 is supported. VP9 and AV1 support is still spotty, but I think those can't be encoded in real-time anyway.