Experimental Nouveau DRM Branch Yields Better GDDR5 Kepler Re-Clocking

If you've been reading Phoronix any length of time for open-source graphics news, you'll know the most difficult challenge facing open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver developers is the re-clocking / power management situation. It's been slow and re-clocking still leaves a lot to be desired.

You can find out more about that via the recent Trying Out The Open-Source NVIDIA/Nouveau Driver Rework In Linux 4.3 and the numerous Phoronix articles mentioning re-clocking. By default, the NVIDIA GPUs running Nouveau are bound to their boot frequencies, which for newer GPUs is particularly low. With Kepler class hardware, the core re-clocking is working out fairly well but the memory re-clocking has been the biggest pain and when trying to re-clock to a performance state too high will generally be show-stopping. But if you don't re-clock, the Nouveau DRM performance will be very low and really not suitable for gaming.

A few Phoronix readers have pointed out today this Reddit thread about a user trying this independent "GDDR5" branch of the Nouveau DRM driver. With this GDDR5 branch, the Kepler memory re-clocking is working better. This user allegedly was able to fully re-clock his GeForce GTX 760 on Nouveau.

In the next few days I'll try out this GDDR5 branch and see how it goes for my extensive collection of GTX 600/700 series hardware. If you give it a whirl, be sure to share your results in our forums.