Nouveau Re-Clocking, NVIDIA vs. Nouveau Drivers

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Nouveau Re-Clocking, NVIDIA vs. Nouveau Drivers

After some dabbling this weekend with Ubuntu 12.10 on both the Nouveau and NVIDIA graphics drivers, there's both good and bad news to share.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=17950

[F i L]

Wow, the performance of the open-source nVidia driver is much better than I expected. It's awesome to see it actually out-perform the proprietary driver with Warsow (even if it looses by a lot in other games).

I can't wait for the next comprehensive driver tests for AMD.. It would be nice to see the results between not only the closed and open source varieties for Linux, but also a comparison between the Win7 drivers. On my Radeon HD 4870 with fglx, Uniengine Heaven bench test runs ~2-5 fps on Linux @ 1080p on Linux and ~30-45 fps on Win7. It also runs ~60 fps @ 720p on Win7, but on maybe ~8-12 fps on Linux. It's kinda pathetic that proprietary drivers for Windows run so much faster than Linux (Damn you AMD!). I am running Gnome-Shell, but it's running full-screen so that shouldn't be an issue (plus with the right tweeks Gnome-Shell runs pretty good with fglx).

[Yorgos]

Wow, the performance of the open-source nVidia driver is much better than I expected. It's awesome to see it actually out-perform the proprietary driver with Warsow (even if it looses by a lot in other games).

I can't wait for the next comprehensive driver tests for AMD.. It would be nice to see the results between not only the closed and open source varieties for Linux, but also a comparison between the Win7 drivers. On my Radeon HD 4870 with fglx, Uniengine Heaven bench test runs ~2-5 fps on Linux @ 1080p on Linux and ~30-45 fps on Win7. It also runs ~60 fps @ 720p on Win7, but on maybe ~8-12 fps on Linux. It's kinda pathetic that proprietary drivers for Windows run so much faster than Linux (Damn you AMD!). I am running Gnome-Shell, but it's running full-screen so that shouldn't be an issue (plus with the right tweeks Gnome-Shell runs pretty good with fglx).

the latest drivers do not support any graphic cards prior to the 5000 series.
additionally, any amd driver that supports the 4000 series like you and me have, is not compatible with the latest version of the xorg.
we are stuck with the open source driver my friend


I wonder if this clocking problem exists in the open-source ati driver and if this is the problem that causes simple 3d graphics like particles "lag" the application.

[curaga]

FOSS radeon has the same limit (only uses bios tables), but on Radeon cards the BIOS settings usually make sense (full clocks available).

[ethana2]

I didn't know that so much of the Nouveau performance disadvantage was due to clock speed differences.. That's very encouraging to me.. That means double-digit performance gains in the next few months with relatively little additional code. Awesome.

It seems things are about to get a lot more interesting.

[F i L]

the latest drivers do not support any graphic cards prior to the 5000 series.
additionally, any amd driver that supports the 4000 series like you and me have, is not compatible with the latest version of the xorg.
we are stuck with the open source driver my friend


I wonder if this clocking problem exists in the open-source ati driver and if this is the problem that causes simple 3d graphics like particles "lag" the application.

Well I'm running Arch Linux with xorg 1.11 and AMD Catalyst 12.6. Arch has official (but not defaultly enabled) repos for older versions of Catalyst. So i'll be stuck on this Catalyst/Xorg till I upgrade my card.

As far as the open-source AMD drivers go, they totally suck on my system. Not only are they slow as molasses compared to Catalyst, but the open driver stack also lags out my system... IDK what it is exactly, and I've only tried Arch + Gnome-Shell on this system, but with open drivers, the who system "hickups" (pauses for a quarter-second every 15-30 seconds). You notice the hickup if you use art programs and in general it's very annoying.

Even without that problem though, I need Catalyst for Blender.