Nouveau Reclocking: Buggy, But Can Boost Performance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Nouveau Reclocking: Buggy, But Can Boost Performance

Over the weekend I shared that the Nouveau driver project, which seeks to provide an open-source NVIDIA graphics driver for Linux and other platforms via reverse-engineering, hit a major milestone. The Nouveau driver now supports re-clocking for several generations of NVIDIA GeForce hardware, which allows the open-source driver to put the graphics cards at their properly designed operating frequencies for maximum performance. This can result in the Nouveau driver performing much better against the official closed-source NVIDIA graphics driver, but the support is still very experimental. Initial testing over the weekend found this support to perform well when it works, but that overall it is still very buggy.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=17007

[Welsh Dwarf]

Even as an ATI card owner, I'm really excited about this.

Bugs aside (they'll be worked out in a month or so) we are within a factor of 2 of the NVIDIA blob running doom3 (ie shader based, more or less modern, gpu taxing game).

When the first Doom3 benchmarks came out, the difference was a factor of 10.

That's a massive improvement. Congratulations Nouveau/mesa teams.

[AlbertP]

It can't just boost performance, it can also save power for certain GPU's. My laptop boots at power level 1, but I can now set Nouveau to level 0 to save power.

[mirza]

It seems that, by the end of this year, Nouveau can catch-up with binary blob performance-wise, making binary blob obsolete in the same second (except for newest chip). Maby that could be a moment for NVIDIA, to get their heads out of their asses and start investing in Nouveau.

[AlbertP]

Honestly I don't think it will catch up that fast, as there's still loads of OpenGL3/4 work to do. But yes reaching over 60% of the blob's speed is already possible with some games when manually setting the highest performance level. And also the support for SLI, TV-out, video decode, HDMI audio, OpenCL, etc. is still missing or not as good as the blob.

[birdie]

It seems that, by the end of this year, Nouveau can catch-up with binary blob performance-wise, making binary blob obsolete in the same second (except for newest chip). Maby that could be a moment for NVIDIA, to get their heads out of their asses and start investing in Nouveau.

Catching up won't be easy if possible ever, because NVIDIA binary driver has a lot of "optimizations", aka cheats (I don't blame NVIDIA here, ATI does the same).

[Paulie889]

Can someone explain to me why its usually the lowend cards that have the best relative performance with mesa? This is not only nouveau, but even lowend radeons have usually much higher relative performance then their highend counterparts.

[Drago]

Catching up won't be easy if possible ever, because NVIDIA binary driver has a lot of "optimizations", aka cheats (I don't blame NVIDIA here, ATI does the same).

Cheats you say. Yes, but in the open source land the software can just be fixed, and won't need cheats.
With the proprietary software Mesa3D may not equal blob performance. But hey, there are plenty of open source games.
What bothers me more, is that when this power management is finished, AMD goes to the tail of Linux GPU support, besides of their best efforts Which is just sad. Even not supported by nvidia nouveau driver gets really closer to the blob. Intel...well they don't have a blob at all. I hope that with SI, the gap will be smaller, but still there are awful lot of Evergreen GPUs out there. Mine too

[Drago]

Can someone explain to me why its usually the lowend cards that have the best relative performance with mesa? This is not only nouveau, but even lowend radeons have usually much higher relative performance then their highend counterparts.

My first guess, the optimizing shader compiler of the blob is better. With much more pixels on screen, the performance gap widens.

[crazycheese]

Thats hellofaboost! Thats 80% of proprietary driver! Very impressive!