For At Least One Game, Mesa's NVK Driver Can Outperform NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver

[LinAGKar]

that is not what the title says. " Mesa's NVK Driver Can Outperform NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver".
Meaning an opengl/dx title using mesa opengl/dx -> NVK vs nvidias opengl/dx driver.

Nvidia doesn't have a DX driver on Linux, so when it's running on the proprietary driver it's also translated to Vulkan. And NVK is just a Vulkan driver, Mesa's D3D9 driver is not involved. As others have said, it's running on DXVK in both cases.

[kpedersen]

On the other hand this puts nvidia in a bad spot.

Nah, its easy. Nvidia will just employ a couple of guys to contribute to Nouveau a little bit more now that all the real hard work is done. Then in a few years, the later generation of Phoronix readers will just worship Nvidia for their fantastic and crucial work and contribution.

Then Nvidia may even start to lock parts of it as extensions behind a paywall and people will defend them saying that they should be entitled to payment and absolute control for "all *their* hard work".

[Weasel]

Open source Vulkan performs better in this situation than Vulkan from proprietary blob.

You should be just as enthusiastic when it performs worse in other 99% of cases, if you want to do proper impartial comparison.

[QwertyChouskie]

Ladies and gentlemen...

It begins.

Remember a few years ago, when were were celebrating a small handful of games that ran better on Proton/DXVK than Windows? Now many, if not most, games do. It's almost certainly a matter of time until the same is true for NVK vs blob. The FOSS+shared architecture model of GPU driver development has proven itself time and time again to result in way better drivers (faster, more features, way fewer implementation bugs) than the every-GPU-manufacturer-reinvents-the-wheel approach.

Also. it's a know fact that Nvidia's GPU drivers on Windows have a higher CPU overhead than AMD's GPU drivers on Windows (I think Hardware Unboxed did a video about this), so it doesn't surprise me one bit that Nvidia's GPU drive on Linux has a higher CPU overhead than the massively-optimized Mesa architecture.

[timofonic]

You should be just as enthusiastic when it performs worse in other 99% of cases, if you want to do proper impartial comparison.

Curb your enthusiasm! Holy NVIDIA is in danger!

[Alexmitter]

Nah, its easy. Nvidia will just employ a couple of guys to contribute to Nouveau a little bit more now that all the real hard work is done. Then in a few years, the later generation of Phoronix readers will just worship Nvidia for their fantastic and crucial work and contribution.

Then Nvidia may even start to lock parts of it as extensions behind a paywall and people will defend them saying that they should be entitled to payment and absolute control for "all *their* hard work".

There will always be a Birdie, no matter where you go or what happens.

[avis]

I've not seen raw frames stored in PNG to be sure that NVK renders the same picture that NVIDIA does. What if it cuts corners and doesn't apply/enable certain effects?

Don't be so fast.

[QwertyChouskie]

I've not seen raw frames stored in PNG to be sure that NVK renders the same picture that NVIDIA does. What if it cuts corners and doesn't apply/enable certain effects?

Don't be so fast.

The game in question is a DX9 game running on a 3090. Really this is a benchmark of CPU overhead, disabling GPU effects wouldn't really make a difference of either driver, not that a DX9 game is likely to have a ton of effects anyways. Honestly, if NVK didn't beat the Nvidia blob, which is known to have high CPU overhead, even compared to the AMD Windows drivers (which are a lot less optimized than the Mesa driver stack/infrastructure), that would just mean NVK had some glaring bug/issue that caused high CPU overhead for some reason, or had an even more glaring issue that somehow made a DX9 game GPU-bound on a 3090.

NVK was written from the ground-up to be a good, clean implementation of a Mesa Vulkan driver, and now the NAK shader compiler has also replaced the infamously janky Nouveau Codegen shader compiler that was known for producing extremely slow (e.g. missing UBO support) and often buggy shader code.

[EliasOfWaffle]

The game in question is a DX9 game running on a 3090. Really this is a benchmark of CPU overhead, disabling GPU effects wouldn't really make a difference of either driver, not that a DX9 game is likely to have a ton of effects anyways. Honestly, if NVK didn't beat the Nvidia blob, which is known to have high CPU overhead, even compared to the AMD Windows drivers (which are a lot less optimized than the Mesa driver stack/infrastructure), that would just mean NVK had some glaring bug/issue that caused high CPU overhead for some reason, or had an even more glaring issue that somehow made a DX9 game GPU-bound on a 3090.

NVK was written from the ground-up to be a good, clean implementation of a Mesa Vulkan driver, and now the NAK shader compiler has also replaced the infamously janky Nouveau Codegen shader compiler that was known for producing extremely slow (e.g. missing UBO support) and often buggy shader code.

Missing UBO is already fixed iirc.
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/...requests/26615 looks it

[kpedersen]

There will always be a Birdie, no matter where you go or what happens.

Indeed. People who worship idiot companies like Microsoft, RedHat and Nvidia.