Open-Source Nouveau Extended To Support The GeForce 16 Series With Hardware Acceleration

With the big Linux 5.6 kernel on the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver side there is finally accelerated support for the GeForce RTX 2000 "Turing" graphics cards (when paired with binary-only microcode). With that initial cut support is no GeForce 16 series Turing support, but that is now on-deck for Linux 5.7.

While the GeForce 16 series is Turing based and just without the RTX cores, firmware/microcode differences and other subtle changes were needed to the Nouveau kernel driver for enabling its open-source hardware accelerated support.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER Linux Gaming Performance

That NVIDIA Turing TU116/TU117 support is now queued in the Nouveau development tree so that come Linux 5.7 the GeForce GTX 1650 and GTX 1660 series can run on this open-source driver stack. Granted, the closed-source firmware binaries are necessary and there is no re-clocking yet so the hardware is pegged to running at its generally very low boot clock speeds and that means extremely slow performance.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER Linux Performance

We'll see what more materializes for Nouveau in Linux 5.7, in addition to the NVIDIA format modifiers support that already landed in the Nouveau DRM Git repository this week.