From AMD to NVIDIA

[Amarildo]

Given the persistent troubles with TF2 and X-Plane on OSS AMD (the two titles I play the most), I'm considering changing my R9 270X with a GTX 680. Since I haven't used NVIDIA in a few years, I need to know how is Nouveau's performance on that card, if it needs a firmware blob to work (not against that), if Nouveau can do CUDA rendering on Blender, and of course if it's worth changing cards.

[chithanh]

You expect nouveau to work better in games where radeonsi has troubles? I don't think you are going to see that.

Anyway, here are Phoronix benchmarks: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...linux46-kepler
Kepler does not need firmware blobs with Nouveau, only Maxwell and later do.
For CUDA, you will need the proprietary driver.

[darius]

Given the persistent troubles with TF2 and X-Plane on OSS AMD (the two titles I play the most), I

what version of mesa are you using and what problems are you talking about?

[Amarildo]

You expect nouveau to work better in games where radeonsi has troubles? I don't think you are going to see that.

Anyway, here are Phoronix benchmarks: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...linux46-kepler
Kepler does not need firmware blobs with Nouveau, only Maxwell and later do.
For CUDA, you will need the proprietary driver.

Yes, I do For what I could see, the 680 has a very good performance on Team Fortress 2, and I didn't see any problems with it on recent articles.

How about OpenCL 1.2 on Nouveau? Is that a thing?

[Amarildo]

what version of mesa are you using and what problems are you talking about?

It happens on any Mesa version from 10 to 12.1 (compiled against llvm-svn-3.9), the problem is in the Radeon Kernel driver

I'm 100% positive it's something VALVe introduced, but they refuse to admit it: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/ste...ux/issues/4409
That's because all fencing timeouts and restarts have been fixed in linux-git (4.7 rc6, and obviously rc7), so there is something in Team Fortress 2 that was introduced in late December 2015.
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=95308
I'll probably do some bisecting on this, though.

Then there's another bug which I reported several months ago, but aparently those guys don't care about the Kernel bug tracker and so I should report it on FDO's tracker: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=110121

Then there's the quirk that makes my screen flicker https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=103271
I can revert it, but I have to compile the Kernel at each update.

[chithanh]

How about OpenCL 1.2 on Nouveau? Is that a thing?

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

[Shalrath]

Also affected by this problem.


Considering my R9 270 is getting a bit old, I'm tempted to upgrade to an RX480, but I have no idea whether this bug persists on GCN1.2 hardware.


(cue debianxfce copypasting a bunch of crap about switching distros)

[Amarildo]

Shalrath This is not a card related bug, it's a driver related bug. It doesn't matter if you change to the RX480, because this TF2 bug is present on both Radeon and AMDGPU Kernel drivers, so it doesn't matter the card you use :/

[bridgman]

It happens on any Mesa version from 10 to 12.1 (compiled against llvm-svn-3.9), the problem is in the Radeon Kernel driver

Developer consensus seems to be that the problem is more likely to be in the Mesa driver than the kernel driver.