How Nouveau Compares To NVIDIA's Linux Driver When Kepler Re-Clocking Works

[shmerl]

Being open-source, KMS, Wayland, HD TTY, fewer issue with window managers etc...
If I had a 680 I would think about switching right now

I have 680, but I won't consider switching until dynamic reclocking will work. You don't want your card to run in full performance mode all the time, especially when system is idle.

[Tomin]

No way! I can't believe it! These improvements are completely insane, hell it even outperformed the proprietary drivers on one test.

I guess you didn't read the part that they didn't render the same results. Nvidia looked better than nouveau. Anyway nice improvement.

I'm still waiting for reclocking on GTX460, but it's nice to read about improvements to other cards too.

[Kristian Joensen]

Thanks for the answers guys. The open source part I get 100% and I absolutely wish the open source drivers were 100% competitive with their proprietary counterparts but from the perspective of a gamer as low as 65% performance is not really acceptable, in a scenario with 30 FPS that puts you at 19.5 FPS with the open source driver, which is far from playable. Significant reductions in graphics quality isn't something that gamers want either.

It is great seeing the progress being made on the OpenGL 4.x front, but 4.5 was released 1 year, 3 months and 16 days ago. I am afraid the open source drivers are chasing a moving target. Vulkan is about to be released is that something the open source drivers will be able to support relatively quickly? Will they even have to? I am not sure how those sorts of things work.

Edit:

Hmm, LunarG and Valve are already working on a open source Vulkan driver for Intel hardware, right? Can that be used as a basis / starting off point for similar drivers for Nvidia and AMD hardware?

[justmy2cents]

All things given, the GTK680 results are impressive.

i think impressive is not the world you're looking for. it is way beyond that

[justmy2cents]

Thanks for the answers guys. The open source part I get 100% and I absolutely wish the open source drivers were 100% competitive with their proprietary counterparts but from the perspective of a gamer as low as 65% performance is not really acceptable, in a scenario with 30 FPS that puts you at 19.5 FPS with the open source driver, which is far from playable. Significant reductions in graphics quality isn't something that gamers want either.

It is great seeing the progress being made on the OpenGL 4.x front, but 4.5 was released 1 year, 3 months and 16 days ago. I am afraid the open source drivers are chasing a moving target. Vulkan is about to be released is that something the open source drivers will be able to support relatively quickly? Will they even have to? I am not sure how those sorts of things work.

Edit:

Hmm, LunarG and Valve are already working on a open source Vulkan driver for Intel hardware, right? Can that be used as a basis / starting off point for similar drivers for Nvidia and AMD hardware?

you have to take it with other perception. a lot of us are not just gamers and integration of OSS drivers means much more than meager 35%. it is easy to buy one rank better card than one otherwise would, except right now NVidia makes this logic hard because they don't provide firmware they promised

as far as chasing moving target, with Vulkan there will probably be much less problem than with OpenGL. for Vulkan there will be at least one (Intel) OSS full implementation they can follow and quite a lot of parts are not in driver anymore. for OpenGL there is no such thing and has to be reinvented part by part

[shmerl]

It is great seeing the progress being made on the OpenGL 4.x front, but 4.5 was released 1 year, 3 months and 16 days ago. I am afraid the open source drivers are chasing a moving target. Vulkan is about to be released is that something the open source drivers will be able to support relatively quickly? Will they even have to? I am not sure how those sorts of things work.

It's indeed somewhat of a wasted effort in the long term. Because once Vulkan will be out, I expect someone starting a new project for OpenGL implementation atop of Vulkan. That would basically render all those hardware specific OpenGL implementations obsolete. But it would take quite a while. At least it will be one uniform implementation that can be optimized going forward. It will be useful for legacy games (which are the vast majority now). Future games and applications will already use Vulkan.

[pixo]

Hmm, LunarG and Valve are already working on a open source Vulkan driver for Intel hardware, right? Can that be used as a basis / starting off point for similar drivers for Nvidia and AMD hardware?

AMD is planning to opensource their Vulkan implementation after some time. It will be interesting to see how long it will take them.

[jf33]

DRI_PRIME is another reason for open-source drivers.

[hubick]

I really appreciate the work these guys are putting into the Nouveau driver. It's a huge and complicated undertaking, and akin to doing it while blindfolded (no hardware specs). I run Linux because I value open source, and someday really hope to be able to run on the open driver.

But, I spent major bucks on a GTX 980 because I needed to drive my 4K screen for complex graphics tasks, and it still looks like I could only expect from 15% to 25% of the performance I get with the binary driver. That's not enough to make it even a usable option, let alone something to get excited about. Sorry.

[imirkin]

But, I spent major bucks on a GTX 980 because I needed to drive my 4K screen for complex graphics tasks, and it still looks like I could only expect from 15% to 25% of the performance I get with the binary driver. That's not enough to make it even a usable option, let alone something to get excited about. Sorry.

Actually you can expect about 0.01% of perf on GTX 980. There's no accel with nouveau for now on GM20x GPUs. They've locked down the firmware, it has to be signed in order to be uploaded.