This Low-End NVIDIA Card Has The Potential To Perform Competitively Using Nouveau

[phoronix]

Phoronix: This Low-End NVIDIA Card Has The Potential To Perform Competitively Using Nouveau

With yesterday's NVIDIA GeForce GT 710 Linux testing was just the start of our tests for this sub-$50 USD graphics card powered by a cut-down Kepler GPU. Yesterday's article just included some basic NVIDIA binary driver tests while today's article includes Nouveau performance figures...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GT-710-Nouveau-Tests

[andre30correia]

vdpau works? it's the big point here

[duby229]

I think it's a whole lot better than yesterdays article. It may not exactly be playable settings, but it's seems to be the settings closest to playable. That's perfectly fine in my opinion.

[Kemosabe]

Now we need competitive drivers for a competitive card ... *running away*

[DanL]

vdpau works? it's the big point here

Not really sure why VDPAU would be any different on this card than the other GK208 cards (or any VP5 card): https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/VideoAcceleration/

[DanL]

Now we need competitive drivers for a competitive card ... *running away*

I know few care about 3D framerates on this kind of card, but don't you think these results bode well for higher end Kepler cards? (I just got home from a 12 hour shift and I'm too tired to dig up benchmarks.)

As for this GT710, what it really needs is to be a Maxwell GM2xx card so it can be a more desirable HTPC card. Nvidia just keeps rolling out the same unexciting, rebadged crap at the low end. What was the last good <=$75 card Nvidia made that was great for video playback and could do some light gaming? The GT440?

[blackout23]

That feeling when a 50 USD card has more VRAM than your GTX 580....

[smitty3268]

I know few care about 3D framerates on this kind of card, but don't you think these results bode well for higher end Kepler cards? (I just got home from a 12 hour shift and I'm too tired to dig up benchmarks.)

It's pretty typical for the lower-end cards to look decent in Mesa, because a lot of the micro-optimizations that speed up the CPU limitations in the binary drivers are less noticeable on slow hardware. They become more visible the faster the GPU is and the more it's waiting on other parts of the system to keep it fed.

That said, it's great that this card seems to work fairly well. That's an accomplishment in it's own right given the lack of documentation/help available from nvidia.

[Tomin]

That feeling when a 50 USD card has more VRAM than your GTX 580....

Well yeah, but I bet your GTX580 doesn't have DDR3 on 64-bit bus.

[rob11311]

Well yeah, but I bet your GTX580 doesn't have DDR3 on 64-bit bus.

True but very likely quite good enough for many people. I have an AMD 4650 with 512MiB DDR2 RAM and it's quite beefy enough for window managers, classic games and video play back. Before the dynamic power management was included in the FOSS driver, I actually used to put it in a lower power mode via run level script to quieten the fan. Only needed the GPU at full speed, when/if running an OpenGL game