Open-Source NVIDIA Vulkan Driver "NVK" Begins Running Talos Principle... Slowly

[dimko]

Wait, we can expect performant nvidia cards running nouveau??!

Arm... Not sure if this is anyhow related to Nouveau. Mesa stuff + Recently opened drivers by Nvidia are separate things. If i understand, Nouveau has nothing to do with new OS driver nvidia is slowly releasing. VERY slowly. I may be wrong though.

[Alexmitter]

Arm... Not sure if this is anyhow related to Nouveau. Mesa stuff + Recently opened drivers by Nvidia are separate things. If i understand, Nouveau has nothing to do with new OS driver nvidia is slowly releasing. VERY slowly. I may be wrong though.

No you are wrong. Nvidia released a FLOSS kernel module for their driver with the explicit note that "it can be used as a example for Nouveau". And this is exactly what Nouveau does right now, integrate the magic from Nvidias released kernel module into its tree.

[Khrundel]

Nothing to be excited about. The history of opensource AMD drivers clearly demonstrated that community can't develop GPU driver. 8 years of development weren't enough to create a decent opengl implementation for AMD VLIW architecture. GPU generations life is too short, it becomes obsolete before obtaining fully functional drivers. Only after Valve had started to fund this development linux have got good amd driver relatively in time (for example it took 2 years to implement RT support). So it is time to ask who will develop nouveau/nvk or fund this job? Nvidia? They don't need this, they are supporting linux themselves. Valve? They don't need this too, as long as there is good vulkan implementation from nvidia. FOSS zealots? They don't have enough money + they hate nvidia and nvidia customers.

[ntropy]

Nothing to be excited about. The history of opensource AMD drivers clearly demonstrated that community can't develop GPU driver. 8 years of development weren't enough to create a decent opengl implementation for AMD VLIW architecture. GPU generations life is too short, it becomes obsolete before obtaining fully functional drivers. Only after Valve had started to fund this development linux have got good amd driver relatively in time (for example it took 2 years to implement RT support). So it is time to ask who will develop nouveau/nvk or fund this job? Nvidia? They don't need this, they are supporting linux themselves. Valve? They don't need this too, as long as there is good vulkan implementation from nvidia. FOSS zealots? They don't have enough money + they hate nvidia and nvidia customers.

Only thing I could imagine is cars industry. Think that was the reason all along nvidia went partly open source finally (that and the hack). VW OS for instance is based on the Linux kernel.

[dimko]

No you are wrong. Nvidia released a FLOSS kernel module for their driver with the explicit note that "it can be used as a example for Nouveau". And this is exactly what Nouveau does right now, integrate the magic from Nvidias released kernel module into its tree.

I was under impression that late open sourced driver that Nvidia provided was its own branch, nothing t do with Nouveau.

They provided much more than just what is bare minimum for noveau.(fuck the guy who came up with this name, i refuse to spell it correctly)

[Terr-E]

Mistake? The gtx 1650 also has one.

The GTX 16xx cards are basically RTX 2000 series without the raytracing and AI / Tensor cores right ?
Both based on the Turing architecture. Maybe it would been more accurate to say that the DSP is found in Turing generation cards and newer, but it might also have been more confusing for some since Turing is not the name that's on the box so to speak.

[bridgman]

They provided much more than just what is bare minimum for noveau.(fuck the guy who came up with this name, i refuse to spell it correctly)

If you were a French-speaking university student living in Paris and working on a new open source driver for NV hardware then calling it NouVeau ("new" in French) would seem like a pretty good idea, and the open source community seems to agree.

[marlock]

With Vulkan at least, yes. I think the OpenGL side still needs other optimizations on top of reclocking. I am assuming optimizing a Vulkan driver is simpler than optimizing an OpenGL driver since Vulkan is lower level, but this is coming from someone who hasn't worked with either of the two APIs, so take my assumption with a grain of salt until, hopefully, someone more knowledgable in this thread approve or disapprove it.

Mesa has Zync quickly improving for OpenGL over Vulkan, so if they focus all their efforts on the Vulkan bringup it will automatically result in decent OpenGL support too (albeit at an average of ~80% the performance of direct OpenGL support last I checked it, and over non-optimized Vulkan for a while)

IIRC Khronos.org and Zync talks about future hardware support corroborate your idea that a lower-level API like Vulkan is indeed easier to implement than OpenGL

[dimko]

If you were a French-speaking university student living in Paris and working on a new open source driver for NV hardware then calling it NouVeau ("new" in French) would seem like a pretty good idea, and the open source community seems to agree.

Open Source community doesn't care enough to rename it ;D

[marlock]

Open Source community doesn't care enough to rename it ;D

IMHO it's actually a good name.

I would wager only people who only speak english would have an issue with it, and even then only very few people.

Also only very few names are actually bad... that's only an issue if it's grossly misleading, deeply offensive or conflicts with some other namespace

It's also a lot of work changing names all over the codebase, graphic assets, documentation, etc... and more importantly, even once that's done any 3rd-party references to your software (especially blog posts, news, forum discussions, stackexchange and whatnot will forever be split with old content pointing towards the previous name, harming discovery