How Nouveau Compares To NVIDIA's Linux Driver When Kepler Re-Clocking Works

[phoronix]

Phoronix: How Nouveau Compares To NVIDIA's Linux Driver When Kepler Re-Clocking Works

With the upcoming Linux 4.4 kernel, the Kepler re-clocking is in much better shape and for select GeForce GTX 600/700 series cards now allows the open-source driver to run them at their fully-rated clock frequencies. Here's some tests showing how Nouveau now compares to NVIDIA's proprietary Linux driver in such a comparison.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=22458

[jrch2k8]

Are you sure memory was scaling up in Xonotic? is weird that huge difference (unless nVidia blob have benchmark optimisation for Xonotic, maybe someone with nVidia card can rename the binary and check this)

[r1348]

All things given, the GTK680 results are impressive.

[Kristian Joensen]

Why use Nouveau with fewer features and/or lesser performance than Nvidia's proprietary driver? Is there any concrete benefit?

[gufide]

Why use Nouveau with fewer features and/or lesser performance than Nvidia's proprietary driver? Is there any concrete benefit?

Being open-source, KMS, Wayland, HD TTY, fewer issue with window managers etc...
If I had a 680 I would think about switching right now

[rabcor]

No way! I can't believe it! These improvements are completely insane, hell it even outperformed the proprietary drivers on one test. This is especially good news since I only have Fermi and Kepler cards.

It's not as good as the proprietary driver just yet, but this brings them one big step closer, I am very pleased with this.

Why use Nouveau with fewer features and/or lesser performance than Nvidia's proprietary driver? Is there any concrete benefit?

Just that it's open source is enough of a benefit on it's own, for me it's the KMS and Mesa support which in turn allow for Wayland support, I am planning on developing my own wayland compositor, and I cannot do such work effectively without KMS and EGL and OpenGL ES support (The proprietary driver only has the ground work for kms laid, and egl and opengl es are only supported on X at the moment.)

It's also just more friendly for the linux ecosystem, most of our hardware is running on open source drivers and most projects who need to coordinate with graphics drivers will coordinate with mesa and open source driver implementations rather than the proprietary ones (not necessarily because they don't want to coordinate with the proprietary ones, but more because they are proprietary and they have no clue what is going on inside these drivers so they can't really coordinate with them, they can just spray(code) and pray for the proprietary drivers. Which is how we have come to this situation of wayland not being supported on proprietary drivers, software like it has no choice but to coordinate with the graphics drivers, and they just didn't have access to Nvidia's (or AMD's) proprietary driver code so they couldn't ensure compatibility with them. Mesa, Nouveau, Radeon and Intel's drivers however... all out there in the open. It's the small things like this, they actually matter. On some systems using the open source drivers can mean increased stability. For some people using the open source drivers means that they can fix the things they dislike about their driver whenever they wish (sadly I'm not one of those though, GPU driver development is like way out of my league, but I wouldn't mind changing that))

There's tons of benefits to use nouveau over nvidia's proprietary drivers, but most of these benefits are very subtle and of perhaps little interest to the general consumer (it's an enthusiast thing mostly, or security freak thing, or a developer thing, take your pick, I fall a little bit into all three categories myself but not completely into one of them)

[artivision]

Why use Nouveau with fewer features and/or lesser performance than Nvidia's proprietary driver? Is there any concrete benefit?

Gallium Nine with 100x games vs OpenGL.

[bug77]

Let's see:

Being open-source,

Not relevant, unless you want to contribute and/or test. Or if you think installing a piece of software has something to do with asserting a certain philosophy.

KMS,

The proprietary driver can emulate most things KMS does. And the one that don't work are purely cosmetic, won't break your workflow.

Wayland,

True, if you want to test drive Wayland on nvidia, nouveau is pretty much the only choice.

HD TTY,

Not sure what that is.

fewer issue with window managers

Debatable, to say the least.


Also, without proper reclocking, the card won't be able to run at full speed (which may be ok if you don't need 3D performance), but won't be able to idle properly either (which will burn some unnecessary power).

[karolherbst]

Gallium Nine with 100x games vs OpenGL.

yes, gallium nine runs with better quality and performance on my system compared to the prop driver

[blackout23]

I wonder if you could hook up the Gallium State Tracker interface to the Vulkan driver with a bit of work. Afaik the Gallium drivers are also very bare bones with everything else layered on top of them so that most code can be reused.
D3D11 State Tracker (would have to be built first) on top of NVIDIAs Vulkan driver to play Battlefield and GTA V with good performance would be a dream.