NVIDIA Gaming Performance Minimally Impacted By KPTI Patches

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Gaming on 4 January 2018 at 12:57 PM EST. Page 4 of 4. 6 Comments.
KPTI NVIDIA Benchmarks Linux 4.14
KPTI NVIDIA Benchmarks Linux 4.14

Or with a CPU-bound Xonotic run, the performance also wasn't hit.

KPTI NVIDIA Benchmarks Linux 4.14
KPTI NVIDIA Benchmarks Linux 4.14

Civilization VI allows for capturing the per-frame timing information in our benchmark runs. Here we see the frame times really didn't move at all either with the KPTI enablement.

KPTI NVIDIA Benchmarks Linux 4.14
KPTI NVIDIA Benchmarks Linux 4.14

The OpenArena frame-time also really wasn't affected by Kernel Page Table Isolation on the two tested NVIDIA GPUs using Ubuntu with the Linux 4.14.11 kernel.

As said already, the game load times were not affected either by this new kernel security feature. So long story short, the NVIDIA gaming performance -- similar to the already published Radeon results -- are minimally impacted by KPTI if at all. Reports of the NVIDIA driver being more adversely impacted by KPTI than Radeon appear to be unfounded.

In all of my KPTI / "CPU bug" testing so far this week, the most noticeable but still not anything close to being like a universal "5~30% slowdown" (what some other outlets have been erroneously reporting) is just with select high I/O workloads and VM performance suffering in some situations.

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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.