Nouveau Re-Clocking Is Way Faster, Shows Much Progress For Open-Source NVIDIA

[Forge]

Awesome article, it's great to see Nouveau moving forward. Hopefully I'll be able to start using it as my default driver sometime in the next year.

Just a little quibble about a detail in the article; the test rig information box lists the CPU as being "Intel Core i7-4790k @4.00GHz (8 cores)". The 4790k doesn't have 8 cores, it has 4 cores, it can handle 8 threads. The preferred Intel nomenclature seems to be "4C8T", "8 threads", or "quad core with HT".

[DeepDayze]

I wonder how much of the interest in Nouveau is because its an uphill fight against Nvidia every step of the way. I can't really comprehend how the Nouveau project is as far along as they are - I realize that Nouveau (plus Lima, Freedreno, etc) all piggyback off AMD's Gallium work, who then piggy backs off a lot of Intel work in core Mesa, but the fact that Nouveau is looking to trade blows with RadeonSI while being a reverse engineering project with volunteer devs is amazing.

Maybe AMD shoots themselves in the foot by providing programming manuals, deep technical documentation, and paid developers. Maybe they should release a card as a proprietary black box for a year just to attract hardware hackers to break it open and do most of the work...

The largest contribution from AMD has to be Gallium in general though. The results speak for them selves - almost all the ARM reverse engineered drivers and any new GPU use it. I hope Google is punching themselves in the face for not adopting it in their graphics stack rather than the backwards awful proprietary blobs they have going on in Android.

Would be a cool idea for a new GPU chip that's about to be released. Just give a chip sample under an NDA and with maybe a little info to kickstart the RE then let the hardware hackers at it and see what they come up with as far as a working driver for that GPU.

As for Gallium, its success should have gotten Google into the act and why they didn't jump at it is beyond me.

[Hamish Wilson]

I've got nothing against the nouveau devs you're all doing an awesome job with what you're having to put up with.

However...

What is with these people who think that performance is the only real metric you should be judging a GPU driver by and as a result are trying to compare it favorably to radeon. I'm sorry but no, nouveau is nowhere near radeonSI unless something has changed. it's still something of a craps shoot to see if your card will work with nouveau, whereas it's the rare card that doesn't work with radeonSI. Nouveau still doesn't have full dynamic power management, which by itself means that I can't suggest for people to use Nouveau as a daily driver, radeonSI does and thus can be. Nouveau doesn't have support for it's video codec stuff, radeonSI does. etc etc.

Again nothing against the Nouveau devs, but the people who think that Nouveau and Radeon are anywhere close to the same level at this point are delusional.

Have to agree with this - the work is amazing given the limitations, but those limitations still place it behind the supported FOSS drivers being put out by AMD and Intel.

[MuPuF]

Nouveau doesn't have support for it's video codec stuff, radeonSI does. etc etc.

I won't argue here, just wanted to tell you that Nouveau supports hardware video decoding: http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/VideoAcceleration/

I don't think this is a critical feature, but we do support it as good as nvidia does. Performance and efficiency are the main problems with Nouveau.

[Luke_Wolf]

... unless something has changed, it's still something of a craps shoot to see if your card will work with nouveau...

stupid edit limit

[Luke_Wolf]

I've got nothing against the nouveau devs you're all doing an awesome job with what you're having to put up with.

However...

What is with these people who think that performance is the only real metric you should be judging a GPU driver by and as a result are trying to compare it favorably to radeon. I'm sorry but no, nouveau is nowhere near radeonSI unless something has changed. it's still something of a craps shoot to see if your card will work with nouveau, whereas it's the rare card that doesn't work with radeonSI. Nouveau still doesn't have full dynamic power management, which by itself means that I can't suggest for people to use Nouveau as a daily driver, radeonSI does and thus can be. Nouveau doesn't have support for it's video codec stuff, radeonSI does. etc etc.

Again nothing against the Nouveau devs, but the people who think that Nouveau and Radeon are anywhere close to the same level at this point are delusional.

[zanny]

I wonder how much of the interest in Nouveau is because its an uphill fight against Nvidia every step of the way. I can't really comprehend how the Nouveau project is as far along as they are - I realize that Nouveau (plus Lima, Freedreno, etc) all piggyback off AMD's Gallium work, who then piggy backs off a lot of Intel work in core Mesa, but the fact that Nouveau is looking to trade blows with RadeonSI while being a reverse engineering project with volunteer devs is amazing.

Maybe AMD shoots themselves in the foot by providing programming manuals, deep technical documentation, and paid developers. Maybe they should release a card as a proprietary black box for a year just to attract hardware hackers to break it open and do most of the work...

The largest contribution from AMD has to be Gallium in general though. The results speak for them selves - almost all the ARM reverse engineered drivers and any new GPU use it. I hope Google is punching themselves in the face for not adopting it in their graphics stack rather than the backwards awful proprietary blobs they have going on in Android.

[not.sure]

If everything in the following page's chart is checked off as "Done" then would dynamic power management be finished or would enabling dynamic power management be a separate task for after it's done?

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

Probably depends on what you want. If nothing else, once you can switch power levels reliably you can always run some trivial daemon to detect when a GPU-heavy process (like a game) is being started/stopped and bump up/down the power levels accordingly.

Once they also have performance monitoring for the GPU, and know its load, if of course gets much easier, and I'd expect the driver does it then.

[xeekei]

Please, Nvidia has absolutely no interest in open source. The Nouveau team has to reverse engineer everything from a black box. AMD and Intel have real open source video driver programs.

I know. But they are still progressing nicely? It's very impressive when it is all reverse engineering too.

[Kivada]

That isn't completely true.

They do help the Linux kernel developers for the mobile Nvidia chip (which is where Nvidia doesn't have a large market share).

Only as much as is necessary to get their ARM based Tegra SoCs to run Android.