NVIDIA Sends Out Signed Firmware Images For GP108 Pascal GPUs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA Sends Out Signed Firmware Images For GP108 Pascal GPUs

It looks like NVIDIA is trying to end out 2017 on a high note for Linux customers. After yesterday posting their open-source experimental allocator for Nouveau, today they landed the long sought after GP108 signed firmware files...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-GP108-Firmware

[cl333r]

Great, I got GT1030 and Plasma5 (Neon, Mandriva) ISOs wouldn't boot up (would flicker and freeze) so I couldn't install one from scratch. Hope it means next spring's Plasma5 distros will boot just fine.

I worked around by installing a gnome distro, installing the nvidia binary driver and then installing plasma 5.

[FireBurn]

Are there any other cards missing or is that all of them released (minus the power bits)

[indepe]

How large is the performance advantage provided by re-clocking itself?

[eydee]

How large is the performance advantage provided by re-clocking itself?

Huge. Current cards are very power efficient in idle. Clock speeds are very low, and voltages too. Accelerating a desktop should still work fine, as long as you aren't using 15 monitors at once. Video playback should be fine too, as long as it's not 8k 150Mbps. Forget games, except for the usual 2D side-scroller, that doesn't really need any acceleration.

I'd say it's not a huge issue, as most distributions don't even ship with recent enough kernel/mesa components to even recognize Pascal cards. Even latest live Arch/Manjaro live images die at boot with Nouveau: unsupported chipset. No firmware helps there, as long as the Nouveau package isn't there either.

[caligula]

How large is the performance advantage provided by re-clocking itself?

At least on GTX 1060 the memory speed is 90% and GPU speed over 66% lower in the lowest power mode .

[starshipeleven]

Sigh. Clickbaaaaaaaaait!!!

[Vash63]

Sigh. Clickbaaaaaaaaait!!!

Hmm? I thought the title on this one described the article pretty well, didn't seem like clickbait at all.

[dragon321]

Looks like Nvidia doesn't want to lose blob users. They are ok with releasing firmware to enable acceleration, but not with firmware needed to reclocking and power/fan management which would make Nouveau usable to desktop users (not gamers or CUDA users). Weird. I would use Nouveau if it could give me at least 70% of blob performance which isn't possible without reclocking (Maxwell 2 here). I will test Nouveau when experimental reclocking for Maxwell land in kernel mainline. I have laptop so I can use it.

Respect to Nouveau developers. They have hard work, but still go ahead and improve this driver. Thank You guys for Your work.

[ThoreauHD]

Nvidia are cocksuckers handing out crumbs from their table. Fk them. I hope Navi breaks them in half.