Nouveau Receives Greater Re-Clocking Support

[bridgman]

It's surprisingly hard coming up with the right granularity for feature lists. The RadeonFeature rows keep getting broken up so that finer grained issues can be covered (power management is a good example -- it could probably use 10 rows all by itself).

I guess the problem is that people really want to know about the "edges", ie whether a feature is "finished", "code released upstream but probably not in your distro", "code released upstream but needs boot option to enable", "finished in the sense that these things work but those things aren't optimized yet"... for every GPU/feature intersection in the matrix.

Don't need much detail for the stuff that has been working for a year or stuff which hasn't started, but need lots of detail for the stuff that is in transition. Right now that detail is added by replacing one high level feature row with a bunch of more detailed feature rows, but since there's no "tree widget" in the form it's not easy to collapse those detailed rows back into a high level row when everything is done...

... and so the matrix keeps getting bigger and bigger.

[schmidtbag]

AFAIK this is the nouveau equivalent to RadeonFeature :

http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FeatureMatrix/

Don't know how accurate it is... last update was September so presumably won't reflect recent changes.

Hmm nifty, thanks for the link. Looks like the GeForce 6/7 series is in the best shape, which is nice since I own a 7900. I'm surprised this list is so much shorter than radeon's, there's got to be more features to work on than what's listed.

[bridgman]

AFAIK this is the nouveau equivalent to RadeonFeature :

http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FeatureMatrix/

Don't know how accurate it is... last update was September so presumably won't reflect recent changes.

[schmidtbag]

So in the same vein, the old nvidia hardware support should be pretty much complete already and the other hardware lines are catching up now. Hopefully we'll start seeing launch day support for any future nvidia hardware that comes out.

Not necessarily. The nouveau devs don't have a company backing them and a large percentage of what they accomplished was done through reverse engineering. This means that they could get a big chunk of features completed but lots of holes they won't be able to patch very easily. I haven't yet found a page for nouveau's progress, though I'd really like to see one.

[DeepDayze]

In addition to what DMJC said, have you ever looked at the radeon todo list? Old hardware is almost completely supported, and as of today, supports more features than what the hardware was intended to when released. Consider the poor state that the radeon drivers were in prior to AMD's involvement, and I think it's pretty safe to say that the radeon drivers will be a very reasonable replacement to catalyst in a couple years.

So in the same vein, the old nvidia hardware support should be pretty much complete already and the other hardware lines are catching up now. Hopefully we'll start seeing launch day support for any future nvidia hardware that comes out.

[emerge-e-world]

I believe that nvidia nouveau driver development is hopeless. [..] How can someone hope that nouveau will be in parity with nvidia binary drivers in the future?

How come you say that _now_ that nouveau is finally about to get the one long awaited missing feature, reclocking support? When that one is done I'm pretty sure nouveau will for the first time be very usable to make use of the newer high end cards. Mesa will have opengl4 implemented very soon if they continue at their current pace..

So maaaybe the performance with the nouveau driver will still be behind, but I could live with slightly lower FPS in exchange for sleeping well by using a free software graphics driver, having KMS, Optimus (at least for my notebook) etc. Of course, the performance improvements will only be a matter of some more time once everything else is covered. You can see that with the AMD drivers, which in my opinion will replace catalyst for a majority of users quite soon.

[schmidtbag]

I believe that nvidia nouveau driver development is hopeless. Even AMD that supports open drivers officially is still lacking features for very old hardware (dpm and hdmi audio will be enabled by default in 3.13) and RadeonSi is still far far behind.

How can someone hope that nouveau will be in parity with nvidia binary drivers in the future?

Lets hope that nvidia will be supporting nvidia binary drivers for older hardware in this pace forever.

In addition to what DMJC said, have you ever looked at the radeon todo list? Old hardware is almost completely supported, and as of today, supports more features than what the hardware was intended to when released. Consider the poor state that the radeon drivers were in prior to AMD's involvement, and I think it's pretty safe to say that the radeon drivers will be a very reasonable replacement to catalyst in a couple years.

[DMJC]

I believe that nvidia nouveau driver development is hopeless. Even AMD that supports open drivers officially is still lacking features for very old hardware (dpm and hdmi audio will be enabled by default in 3.13) and RadeonSi is still far far behind.

How can someone hope that nouveau will be in parity with nvidia binary drivers in the future?

Lets hope that nvidia will be supporting nvidia binary drivers for older hardware in this pace forever.

Actually, if you bother reading Nouveau's documentation, the only things missing are power management (which is the big one), as well as OpenCL and SLI support. HDMI Audio is already DONE. Power management is going to be complete by mid next year at this rate (which is ahead of what I predicted by 1.5 years thanks to the NVIDIA Documentation) The Nouveau driver stack is going to rapidly gain ground on the closed drivers. The only lag point by the end of next year will be on OpenGL support and I'd be willing to bet money on that now.

[entropy]

Is this based on documentation released by NVidia?

BTW, what happened after NVidia wrote to the Nouveau ML that they're
now more open towards releasing "some" documentation on request?

[Veerappan]

Yay. I'm sure it'll be a while before it's enabled by default, but my 13" 2009 MBP has a GF9400m which would eventually benefit from this.