Nouveau Developers Remain Blocked By NVIDIA From Advancing Open-Source Driver

[imirkin]

Any new nouveau benches? Despite this I am considering a Nvidia GPU due to where AMD prices are, but I will not go back to binary drivers.

Your best bet with nouveau is a GTX 780/GTX 780 Ti. It's fully reclockable, and Kepler is reasonably well-supported, and it's a 2nd-gen Kepler so it has 256 registers and doesn't run into occasional register allocator issues (yet). I believe it's been benchmarked extensively on this site in the past... you get 60-80% of blob perf depending on the application.

Benchmarks on newer chips aptly demonstrate that higher clocks = faster rendering. Since the boot clocks are like 10% of max (counting the multiplicative effect between RAM and shader core), it's not really worth thinking about if perf is what you're after.

[Guest]

Well, this attitude of nvidia is the reason for me to never buy any hardware with nvidia GPU in it.

So for laptops, buying 8th gen Intel CPU or waiting for AMD Raven Ridge, are only ways to go.

[DanL]

Nvidia opensource, good joke

Seriously them dont have any interest in opensource and with them actions confirm that

If you want buy thinking about opensource clearly nvidia is not your option

In my case stay waiting amd stay in same level to nvidia: features case nvenc, driver gui, compatibility (all opengl AZDO extensions - OpenGL 4.6 with conformant tests passed, no mesa core profile problem), performance and better watt ratio

When amd offer before cited and can offer a gpu with 70 to 75% of performance of my actual GTX 1050 but only consume 30w (passive model will be good) maybe buy amd card*

*All depend opensource driver (waiting how much advance mesa for ubuntu 18.04 lts next year) devs and amd hardware next year (navi 7nm?)

"Me English good!"

[vortex]

Any new nouveau benches? Despite this I am considering a Nvidia GPU due to where AMD prices are, but I will not go back to binary drivers.

Then how do you plan on running the GPU without the blobs?

It is true that there is some serious retailer price gouging going on, and AMD is more harmed by this than others, but, if people keep buying nvidia gear, then nvidia have absolutely ZERO reasons to change their ways.
They got your cash, and that is all they care about.

If you want companies to support open source, then you must buy stuff from those companies. That is the way it works.
If those companies don't see people buying their stuff, then they usually stop open source development since it is throwing $$$ away.

[bridgman]

I think I agree: AMDGPU offers good performance for gaming, but it lacks of other features (OpenCL or DC/DAL).
The NVIDIA driver is non-free, but all features are working.

DC/DAL is not upstream yet but it is already open source and publicly available. OpenCL is also open source and publicly available for recent dGPUs, although again the corresponding kernel code is just being upstreamed now.

I don't think you meant to suggest that "non-free" was better than "not-yet-upstream open source" but that is what your words are saying.

[oooverclocker]

If you want companies to support open source, then you must buy stuff from those companies. That is the way it works.

I completely agree. Buying cards you don't even want just because of 10% performance difference or something is kind of stupid. I think its worth trading many fps for having an easily pluggable device that just works with your computer environment and supporting the whole community your preferred OS is founded on.
Especially when you see the progress every month.

bridgman
All you wrote is correct but it doesn't help the simple users. The Linux user base has grown a lot recently which is nice but of course there are people who can't buy themselves a cookie from having open source code that's not merged into Kernel git. Linux is predestined to be the community platform for software of the future and this means that every one must be able to access it easily.

AMD has been pretty exemplary in successful OpenSource development over the last years and months but I guess you have to tolerate the criticism until the final steps have been accomplished and the common user can access OpenCL and Vulkan with maximum performance in the newest Ubuntu ore something - release without merging and compiling code.

[karolherbst]

Another thing worth noting is that the nvgpu driver is a joke (it's barely developed) and it cannot be merged with upstream (I don't know why but a Nouveau dev said this).

There are many reasons, but the most important ones are:
1. there won't be two drivers supporting the same devices
2. NVGPU only supports a small subset of what Nouveau supports, it's mainly for Tegra
3. There is no Community behind NVGPU

and I don't see Linus or the drm maintainers even thinking about merging nvgpu even if it would be in a better shape.

[gbcox]

I think I agree: AMDGPU offers good performance for gaming, but it lacks of other features (OpenCL or DC/DAL).
The NVIDIA driver is non-free, but all features are working.

And that's perfectly fine... but realize that people vote with their wallets. The message you are sending is that proprietary is a-ok with you. I haven't bought NVIDIA for years because of this. AMD might not be perfect, but at least they are making progress. If the community would fully embrace AMD and stopped buying NVIDIA we wouldn't be having this conversation.

[mphuZ]

I don't think you really meant to say that..

I think he said what he wanted to say.

Everything that you wrote can be marked with a "star", the decoding of which can be read in the "footer" of the page, where it says about the phases of the moon, 25 years of programming experience, the blood of a virgin, and at the end the postscript: "This is Linux, baby !!!".

When the driver will look and fully work the way developers and users want it, then we can open a bottle of champagne!
And while all these promises from the category "Soon™", "FineWine™", etc.

[duby229]

Why then do developers continue to waste their time and develop this driver?
Would send NVIDIA away, and went to help in the development of radeonSI.

It's not that ideological though. The fact is nVidia cards exist and they need a open source driver.