Is The Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Fast Enough For Steam Linux Gaming?

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Is The Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Fast Enough For Steam Linux Gaming?

On the heels of the fresh open-source AMD Linux driver tests with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Team Fortress 2, here are some numbers for these Steam Linux games on the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) graphics driver...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-CSGO-TF2-Tests

[oleid]

The GTX 750 Ti stuck to its (low) boot frequencies are a problem for open-source gamers.

So it is not possible to reclock the card manually, before launching a game?

[directhex]

This really needed comparisons with nvidia-glx in the same charts.

And IME the biggest problem with Nouveau is stability. I could barely get a game to launch without X crashing, when testing.

[edmon]

I'm waiting for promised hack in https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70354 to try TF2

[mao_dze_dun]

But how does it compare to the proprietary driver performance?

[DanL]

This really needed comparisons with nvidia-glx in the same charts.

If reclocking is not functioning correctly, then that seems pointless. IIRC, the last set of benchmarks Michael (Eric?) ran compared binary and nouveau performance, though I can't remember which card(s) he used. As expected, nouveau wasn't competitive when the card wasn't running at full speed.

[zanny]

Gaming on either open source driver is best done on midrange or low end cards, because the devs aren't spending a lot of time optimizing for the high end parts, what with huge memory, bandwidth, tons of parallel cores, special features like trueaudio, etc.. Its why an AMD 6870 is still competitive with everything on Mesa, or a 7770 / 260 is half as fast as a 290x.

[Kano]

But you noticed that there is a difference between r600g and radeonsi in mesa in terms of future feature support?

[bridgman]

Correct, r600g has more "future features" than radeonsi at the moment:

http://mesamatrix.net/

[SystemCrasher]

Gaming on either open source driver is best done on midrange or low end cards, because the devs aren't spending a lot of time optimizing for the high end parts, what with huge memory, bandwidth, tons of parallel cores, special features like trueaudio, etc.. Its why an AMD 6870 is still competitive with everything on Mesa, or a 7770 / 260 is half as fast as a 290x.

But, still, increasing RAM bus width improves speed of most intense operations and 256-bit bus going to be up to 2 times faster than 128-bit, etc (AMD gone as high as 4096-bit on their strange HBM things). Then, if there was enough stuff to chew on, massively parallel core would complete job faster, giving some performance win either. And many low end GPUs are hardly usable for anyhow demanding uses at all.

Improving RAM speed and cores amount tends to improve "most" workloads. Sure, it is really depends and it is somewhat uncommon to buy things like R9 290 for opensource drivers. However, something like R9 270 (which is hardly low end and somewhere at rather high end of mid-range) looks like a good option to my taste. At least, it can handle 2560x1600 screen in full resolution in many cases (monitor interpolation looks awful, isn't it?) unlike slower things. You see, once you want higher resolution, amount of data to compute increases as O(n^2) since each side of screen gets wider. Computing 2560x1600 scene is about 2 times harder than 1920*1080 "on its own". And it would be massively parallel thing most of time. And, you see, if your FPS is jumping between 30 to 60, you'll have hard time playing anything real-time at all. OTOH when it jimps between 60 and 120, it is really different story. Actually, if you care about something real-time, especially, shooters, is is worst-case FPS at most complicated scene what really counts. If it goes below something like 60 even sometimes, you'll be seriously unhappy with the fact how it looks and feels.

And AMD cards are now actually able to deal with quite heavy 3D engines using opernsource drivers. Keeping playable FPS.

I can think about 2 major annoyances so far:
1) Lack of GL 4.x support - some brand new games are not yet working.
2) OpenCL lacks images support so some programs trying to use OpenCL would not be happy, most notably, DarkTable.

(and for most hardcore gamers, there is also lack of overclock and crossfire, but I'm not really sure how much of them care about opensource drivers)

Overall I can admit AMD guys did a really decent job on opensource driver in past few years. While there're some quirks and issues and it is possible to face troubles here and there, esp. with newer GPUs and demanding games, you can expect discrete GPUs to be much faster than integrated Ingel grapics, etc. And nouveau... it is high-quality driver overall, but lack of reclocking kills it. It can not offer anyhow playable FPS on most setups, lacks compute support, etc. So I wonder how the hell one supposed to use such driver. It is unusable on almost all cards except chosen few, where reclock actually works, giving it more or less competetive performance. So, nvidia still haven't learned from "FUCK YOU".