Benchmarks Of Nouveau's Gallium3D Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Benchmarks Of Nouveau's Gallium3D Driver

As we shared a few days ago, Fedora 13 will provide OpenGL acceleration support for NVIDIA graphics cards via the Nouveau driver when installing the Mesa DRI experimental drivers package. There is finally 3D acceleration for NVIDIA graphics cards using an open-source driver on Linux without having to depend upon NVIDIA's official binary driver. What makes this open-source 3D support for NVIDIA GPUs even more interesting is that it is atop the Gallium3D driver architecture rather than classic Mesa. With that said, we are providing early benchmarks of the Nouveau Gallium3D driver in Fedora 13 with two GeForce graphics cards as we compare the performance to NVIDIA's official Linux driver.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=14591

[portets43]

wow. it's actually almost playable.

i can't wait for this to progress, once we get ahold of fedora 13 some of us nvidia users will be able to switch to nouveau only!
and an even larger number of us will be able to go straight nouveau when we get fedora 14!
this is great stuff

[not.sure]

Performance is a bit on the low end. But given that the code just started 'functioning', that's certainly an excellent start!!

[benmoran]

Awesome. I'm really happy to see Nouveau shaping up. I don't own any Nvidia cards now, but i'd hate to be stuck relying on binaries in the event that I one day do.

[kuse]

Will a binary blob driver (eg. Nivida) ever implement the Gallium3d interface? Or is it only possible with OSS-drivers?

[koral]

What about the visual quality?
Did the images produced by the two drivers look the same?
If they do it's really likely that the Gallium3D OpenGL state tracker is good. What about something simpler like glxgears?

[puntarenas]

What about the visual quality?
Did the images produced by the two drivers look the same?

Good point and screenshots would have been nice!

I for one don't care about performance, at least not now. It is amazing to see Nouveau running those games as a proof of feature completeness and stability in the first place.

I want to get rid of the binary blob as soon as possible. This would be my personal roadmap:

• stability
• power management
• accelerated video playback
• full compiz support
• all rendering done "in hardware"
• ...
• ...
• performance tweaking

As beeing said before, idle power consumption with nouveau is 28W higher than with the proprietary driver. Video playback is also a pain, lot's of stuttering as soon as high definition content comes to play. I would not mind going without Compiz for now (not to mention games), but theese are serious showstoppers to me.

[portets43]

This would be my personal roadmap:

• stability
• power management
• accelerated video playback
• full compiz support
• all rendering done "in hardware"
• ...
• ...
• performance tweaking

video acceleration will be available when a vdpau state tracker for gallium3d is made.(people already have plan to make one)

everything else in your list will probably come naturally.

and it looks like someone is trying to reverse engineer the power saving features here: Power Management

[Kazade]

It's interesting that there was hardly any difference between the nouveau powered cards. v-sync was definitely off yeah? Maybe I'm being overly suspicious but the max frame-rates for nouveau were around 50-60fps (e.g. around a monitor refresh rate) without a significant difference between the resolutions.

[ioannis]

It's interesting that there was hardly any difference between the nouveau powered cards. v-sync was definitely off yeah? Maybe I'm being overly suspicious but the max frame-rates for nouveau were around 50-60fps (e.g. around a monitor refresh rate) without a significant difference between the resolutions.

my thoughts exactly!