NVIDIA Fermi On Nouveau Makes Baby Steps Towards Memory Re-Clocking

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA Fermi On Nouveau Makes Baby Steps Towards Memory Re-Clocking

While NVIDIA's GeForce 400/500 "Fermi" graphics cards have since been succeeded by Kepler, Maxwell, and now Pascal, the Fermi hardware is still receiving some love from open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) developers in taking baby steps towards working re-clocking support...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-Fermi-DRAM-Prep

[phoronix38]

This sounds interesting. I have a GTX 580 that has two problems with nouvea; it is a slow and the picture quality is worse than with NVIDIA's proprietarie drivers. If I have Adwaita's dark theme the grey colours look this there is some electrical disturbance in the monitor. With that I mean it looks like horizontal noise but NVIDIAäs drivers does not have this problem at all.

[Jabberwocky]

Looking forward to the day that nouveau has 40% or more of proprietary's performance and is on par with proprietary in terms of features. I recently bought my first Geforce in years, it's a 710 (GK208 NVE0/Kepler) with that card I at least don't need to worry about core/memory clocks or even fan speed (it's silent cooled), the card's TDP is only 19 W. It just idles in my Ryzen server rendering text now and then.

Keep it up, an open source competitor to AMD graphics drivers will be awesome.

[OneBitUser]

Keep it up, an open source competitor to AMD graphics drivers will be awesome.

Allthough I admire Nouveau developers for their work, I also think nouveau will never get close to NVIDIA's proprietary drivers or even the AMD opensource drivers in terms of features and/or performance.
It's not the developers' fault, though: it would simply require a complete turnaround in NVIDIA's policy towards opensource. Right now, NV is actively hindering open source development, and for any substantial nouveau improvements they would have to contribute: by releasing signed firmware on time for newer cards, providing OS developers with documentation, and maybe employing some people to work on their OS drivers full-time.
Right now even open AMD graphics stack has immesurably more resources allocated to its development with several companies employing people to work on them.

[artivision]

Why Nvidia doesn't donate free power management or at least make it hw/firmaware based? Imagine if Intel wouldn't have turbo bust for Linux. I totally believe that Linux will be at 20% on pc, with a D3D11 state tracker and Nvidia reclocking support. This will also raise the demand for free code and people working on it. I don't understand why the community cannot see the obvious for so many years now.

[zboson]

I think a GTX 580 is still faster for double floating point than the GTX 1080.

[schmidtbag]

I totally believe that Linux will be at 20% on pc, with a D3D11 state tracker and Nvidia reclocking support.

20% of what? If you're referring to PC marketshare, then absolutely not. That's making a lot of drastic assumptions.

[andrei_me]

nouveau will never get close to NVIDIA's proprietary drivers or even the AMD opensource drivers in terms of features and/or performance.

Never is a strong word, and you have to set a performance metric so it is not a moving target, like Nouveau is at same perfomance R9 290 in 2014.

I've been reading Phoronix for 2 years before creating my account in forums, I remember how RadeonSI and Nouveau had almost the same performance, and r600 was the perf king .

Fast forward 5 years we have RadeonSI running AAA titles

[schmidtbag]

I've been reading Phoronix for 2 years before creating my account in forums, I remember how RadeonSI and Nouveau had almost the same performance, and r600 was the perf king .

Fast forward 5 years we have RadeonSI running AAA titles

The main difference is the open-source AMD drivers have had a company with paid dedicated developers working toward it within that time frame. Meanwhile, nouveau is almost entirely volunteer devs who are given little to no help or information from Nvidia. And, many nouveau devs have been "bought out" to work on other projects. So sure, it is possible nouveau may reach similar performance levels of the closed-source drivers, assuming Nvidia never released another product ever again. As long as things continue the way they do now, nouveau may never fully catch up. Even radeonSI has a lot of catching up to do and they're lightyears ahead of nouveau.