Trying Out Nouveau's Accelerated Pascal Support With DRM-Next, Mesa 17.2-dev

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Trying Out Nouveau's Accelerated Pascal Support With DRM-Next, Mesa 17.2-dev

One of the many features to look forward to with Linux 4.12 is the Nouveau DRM driver providing initial 3D/accelerated support for GeForce GTX 1050/1060/1070/1080 "Pascal" graphics cards. Here are some benchmarks of this open-source NVIDIA driver support for these latest-generation GPUs compared to the proprietary driver.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=24596

[bug77]

I don't get it, what issues did you have with the 1080Ti? Isn't that how Unity looks? :P

[tebruno99]

"You may be able to run very lightweight OpenGL games on the current Pascal driver stack, but you probably didn't shell out hundreds of dollars to have a severely hampered GPU when using open-source."

Actually given the AMD options, Yes. Yes I did definitely.

[schmidtbag]

Hahaha I'm surprised you bothered testing the 4K results; I'd have just stopped after 1080p.

"You may be able to run very lightweight OpenGL games on the current Pascal driver stack, but you probably didn't shell out hundreds of dollars to have a severely hampered GPU when using open-source."

Actually given the AMD options, Yes. Yes I did definitely.

I'm genuinely confused - you would rather spend hundreds of dollars on an Nvidia GPU using under-developed nouveau drivers over anything AMD? AMD's Linux drivers are generally pretty good, and very good compared to nouveau; arguably they have the best open-source drivers. You'd probably get more performance out of a sub-$100 AMD GPU on radeonsi than you would with a 1080 Ti on nouveau.

[karolherbst]

Sadly there won't be any Pascal reclocking anytime soon, because there is more locked down than it was on Maxwell2, so we need the signed PMU images to even change the voltage or clocks, what we could do without any signed images before.

[Danniello]

Sadly there won't be any Pascal reclocking anytime soon, because there is more locked down than it was on Maxwell2, so we need the signed PMU images to even change the voltage or clocks, what we could do without any signed images before.

Sorry for stupid question but why this PMU firmware cannot be extracted from propertary Linux or even Windows driver? It is encrypted or something?

[kmare]

Sadly there won't be any Pascal reclocking anytime soon, because there is more locked down than it was on Maxwell2, so we need the signed PMU images to even change the voltage or clocks, what we could do without any signed images before.

if for whatever magical reason Nvidia decided to release the PMU signed images, how hard would it be to actually implement support for power management and reclocking?

[starshipeleven]

Sorry for stupid question but why this PMU firmware cannot be extracted from propertary Linux or even Windows driver? It is encrypted or something?

I don't know how is handled in this specific case, but they are using cryptographic signatures so the general explanation is the same.
If you tamper signed files the signature becomes invalid. I assume that they are signing the whole driver blob or something that prevents people from simply extracting them from the driver (like it was done before).
The card's BIOS is checking for these signatures and refuses to load firmwares not signed correctly.

If NVIDIA releases blob files that are individually signed, then no problem.

This system is common in software, also linux distros use it to ensure that the packages you receive aren't tampered by third parties.

[starshipeleven]

I'm genuinely confused - you would rather spend hundreds of dollars on an Nvidia GPU using under-developed nouveau drivers over anything AMD? AMD's Linux drivers are generally pretty good, and very good compared to nouveau; arguably they have the best open-source drivers. You'd probably get more performance out of a sub-$100 AMD GPU on radeonsi than you would with a 1080 Ti on nouveau.

I think he means that he bought NVIDIA to use them with the blob fully knowing that noveau support is crappy and AMD support with blob or opensource is worse than NVIDIA with blob.

[aufkrawall]

I wished X performance of proprietary NV driver woulnd't be garbage. Only KWin works okayishly, but opening windows still makes compositor fps go down.