Nouveau/NVK Driver Lands NIL Library Rewrite In Rust For Mesa 24.1

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Nouveau/NVK Driver Lands NIL Library Rewrite In Rust For Mesa 24.1

In addition to working on NOVA as a Rust-based, GSP-focused NVIDIA open-source kernel graphics driver being developed as the eventual successor to the existing Nouveau DRM kernel driver, over in user-space Mesa developers have begun landing a portion of their Nouveau/NVK driver library code rewritten in Rust...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Nouveau-NIL-Mesa-Begins-Rust

[rabcor]

When are we getting those nvk benchmarks? I'm at the edge of my seat here!

[Spajdrex]

*grabs popcorn

[sarmad]

When are we getting those nvk benchmarks? I'm at the edge of my seat here!

Probably when it gets included out-of-the-box in Ubuntu. Not sure if Ubuntu 24.04 will include the right versions of the kernel and Mesa for that.

Few months ago Michael was already in the middle of doing benchmarks, but those never got released. I guess things didn't look good so he didn't bother.

[Michael]

Probably when it gets included out-of-the-box in Ubuntu. Not sure if Ubuntu 24.04 will include the right versions of the kernel and Mesa for that.

Few months ago Michael was already in the middle of doing benchmarks, but those never got released. I guess things didn't look good so he didn't bother.

Was getting too many DRM errors.... Will try again with Linux 6.9 soon.

[piotrj3]

Not sure if it will be year of linux, but for sure a year of nvidia linux. Nouveau gets more promising, 2 explicit sync merges, KDE6 working well with Nvidia out of box...

[rabcor]

Was getting too many DRM errors.... Will try again with Linux 6.9 soon.

I managed to get it to run on 6.8, it's not looking too hot tho

3070-Ti Laptop 1440p Unscientific Testing:
MPV: Git version worked, Official version did not.
Crysis: Smooth 60fps at max settings minus anti-aliasing.
Oxygen Not Included: ~60fps ZINK (Entirely playable lol)
OpenMW (Modded): ~50fps ZINK with drops (on par with my amd igpu not on zink)
Beat Hazard Classic (Proton): Played just fine, but mangohud didn't work
Dark Souls Prepare to die edition: Played but 30fps locked, didn't test with 60fps fix.
Soul Calibur VI: It's 60 fps locked, but the game ran at a smooth 60fps, doesn't get better than this.
BeamNG.Drive: ~40fps, it's playable but only just
VAM: Froze on startup for unknown reasons
Valheim: 30fps in menus, hung on loading screen (and by hung i mean really not even sigkill would stop it, locked up the entire nvidia gpu too, had to use sysrq+reisub to restart) Someone else ran it quite successfully tho on a far weaker card, but basically same os otherwise, he's using 6.8-RC kernel i'm using 6.8.4 kernel, he is using some custom mesa driver that i am not though, i am on 24.0.4 he is on 24.1 dodonvk whatever that means.

Failures:
Red Alert 2: Wouldn't run (It can be problematic to get it to tho, nothing new)
Beat Hazard (Native): Would not play natively on amdgpu or nouveaau
Beat Hazard (Proton): Would not play natively on amdgpu or nouveaau

So I had 2 games that froze on loading screens (one more catastrophically than the other...), that kinda sucks, but overall a lot of games worked, if ur not trying to play something super graphically intense, odds are it'll play just fine on NVK, I mean it can run crysis!

[rmfx]

rabcor What are the perf with blob drivers on the same machine to get a rough estimate ?

[rabcor]

rabcor What are the perf with blob drivers on the same machine to get a rough estimate ?

I didn't try any actually heavy games, but lest's see...

OpenMW is about on-par but with a lot less fps drops (the proprietary drivers behave weird on it, it should be orders of magnitude faster, but instead it's just same speed as the igpu, and i don't think it's cpu bound)
Crysis: around 130fps, even if i enable AA8x it's still in the 90-100fps range but on nvk it dropped me under 30.
BeamNG: 140fps although it'd go as high as 175 sometimes. 50 was i think highest i saw on nvk.
Valheim: plays fine, didn't bother to check numbers since nvk broke and didn't give me any numbers anyways (but i think it might have gone up to the high 100s, possibly even 200, valheim fps varies quite greatly based on location (mostly how big your base is))

Seems like when nvk is working in my case, proprietary is gonna be anywhere from 3-4x faster in a lot of cases. But i mean look at that 1650-Ti guy on valheim, the potential man, i doubt it's far behind proprietary drivers for that specific card.

[rmfx]

Thanks a lot for the extra time and details

30 percent won't cut it for people to drop their blob, I hope they have strong updates coming.