4K HDMI Appears To Work Much Better With Nouveau On Linux 4.5

[phoronix]

Phoronix: 4K HDMI Appears To Work Much Better With Nouveau On Linux 4.5

While I'm in the middle of a big Nouveau Linux 4.4 vs. Nouveau Linux 4.5 vs. NVIDIA proprietary driver comparison with multiple NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards, I just wanted to pass along a bit of good, non-performance news about Nouveau on Linux 4.5...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-HDMI-4K-Linux-4.5

[Kano]

Maybe you should say which refresh rate. The Maxwell ones (even the gen1 i think) should be able to use 60 hz.

[Goonie]

Great news! Can you also test deep color (e.g. 10 bpp) and HFR (60 Hz)?

[imirkin]

We've set the default maximum HDMI pixel clocks in 4.5 to 225MHz for Fermi and 297MHz for Kepler+ (Tesla remains at 165MHz). Unfortunately we don't have a reliable way of finding the actual limits, e.g. some Fermi's reportedly do 297MHz just fine (and blob is able to detect it) -- you can adjust it manually with the nouveau.hdmimhz=xxx module parameter if you don't like what it defaults to.

[Sonadow]

Will it work with cards that lack the required signed firmware (i.e.: 9xx series)? If it does i may consider getting a 4K monitor for my workstation and using a GTX 950 to drive the display.

[Mangix]

We've set the default maximum HDMI pixel clocks in 4.5 to 225MHz for Fermi and 297MHz for Kepler+ (Tesla remains at 165MHz). Unfortunately we don't have a reliable way of finding the actual limits, e.g. some Fermi's reportedly do 297MHz just fine (and blob is able to detect it) -- you can adjust it manually with the nouveau.hdmimhz=xxx module parameter if you don't like what it defaults to.

this seems to imply that it can go much higher: http://www.monitortests.com/forum/Th...-Clock-Patcher

[imirkin]

Will it work with cards that lack the required signed firmware (i.e.: 9xx series)? If it does i may consider getting a 4K monitor for my workstation and using a GTX 950 to drive the display.

The lack of firmware will in no way effect whether it functions or not. Do note that nouveau on GM20x has gotten *way* less testing than on other chips. If you're looking to use nouveau, I highly recommend sticking to Kepler, which should support 4K screens just fine, and have functioning acceleration. Esp on a 4K screen, you need acceleration more than you think... acceleration isn't just 3d, it's everything.

[mungewell]

Since it's "this particular monitor" they may have fixed something relating to EDID parsing... did you look at the EDID from the monitor to see if it actually makes sense. This can be achieved with 'get-edid' and 'edid-decode' on Ubuntu. "xrandx --verbose" also give a pretty complete report.
How easy is it to update to the lastest Nouveau driver, is there a PPA somewhere?