NVIDIA 313.09 Linux Driver Packs New Features

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA 313.09 Linux Driver Packs New Features

NVIDIA has released their first binary Linux graphics driver beta in the 313.xx series. The NVIDIA 313.09 Beta has bug-fixes plus new features to make for an exciting Linux gaming experience...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTI1MDA

[chuckula]

The performance improvements are definitely nice (and AMD could take a few lessons from Nvidia here..). BUT: These are just micro-optimizations to special cases and don't for one second expect some insane improvement in 3D game framerates or anything like that. Micro-optimizations are good, but the real-world impacts are going to be on the order of a few percentage points here and there. Still nothing to complain about.

[mark45]

Also, glDrawPixels() is for GL 2.1 and earlier versions, the newer ones: GLES 2.0/3.0 and GL 3.3/4.x (core profile) don't support glDrawPixels().

[blackout23]

Give us adaptive Vsync already!

[md1032]

Give us adaptive Vsync already!

It's already there: https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/t...aptive-vsync-/

[blackout23]

Good to know. I was testing SS3 a lot and I get 50-53 FPS on average on Ultra and 1920x1200 which is quite OK. Problem is that as soon as I enable VSync it of course limits itself to 30 FPS to align it with the refreshrate but doesn't do a good job at this. So you have worse performance which feels a lot more laggy and still get screen tearing. So I thought this feature was missing. On Windows I was able to get >30 and <60 FPS without tearing and V Sync would just cap it at 60 most of the time since it is a bit faster there in general. So there is no reason to not enable V Sync in Windows but on Linux the way it is handled now can dramatically change the performance. So I hope to see an override setting in nvidia-settings soon.

[schmidtbag]

The performance improvements are definitely nice (and AMD could take a few lessons from Nvidia here..). BUT: These are just micro-optimizations to special cases and don't for one second expect some insane improvement in 3D game framerates or anything like that. Micro-optimizations are good, but the real-world impacts are going to be on the order of a few percentage points here and there. Still nothing to complain about.

microoptimizing is crucial for things as complicated as GPUs. They add up pretty quickly and if not taken care of, they could make development of more important things more difficult. nvidias drivers aren't that far behind their windows counterparts anyway. I would rather see 10 minor improvements/fixes than 1 big (but not crucial or high priority) one.

[ninez]

This one seems to be a good release. I haven't noticed any regressions, performance seems good ~ possibly even a bit smoother on some of the webGL / h/w acceleration tests online...

I also haven't seen a particular bug in dmesg, that has been common for me when using nvidia with linux-rt, which doesn't take down my system (or cause any noticable problem), but does periodically display in demsg/logs;

[417160.809645] BUG: scheduling while atomic: irq/42-nvidia/1076/0x00000002

...followed by the associated call trace.

I did report this to nvidia, but didn't see any progress/change over several releases and pretty much forgot about it (since it doesn't seem to harm anything).... Maybe this release has taken care of it. (?) I guess in a few days of uptime, i will know for sure.

[e8hffff]

Installing off ppa xorg edgers, system restarted into commandline rather than gfx. Had to clean out all nvidia files of the older driver 310.19 from /var and /usr directories and then install using the installer from nvidia.com. I used Krusader(root) to delete the files. Once done gfx worked but not 3D. Just reinstalled the packages in package-manager(synaptic) for 313.09 and the 3D worked straight after.

Note, to install NVIDA drivers close down all gfx session and goto a root CLI.
'killall lightdm' is if it's still running.
'bash NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-313.09.run' to install

[scix]

Good to know. I was testing SS3 a lot and I get 50-53 FPS on average on Ultra and 1920x1200 which is quite OK. Problem is that as soon as I enable VSync it of course limits itself to 30 FPS to align it with the refreshrate but doesn't do a good job at this. So you have worse performance which feels a lot more laggy and still get screen tearing. So I thought this feature was missing. On Windows I was able to get >30 and <60 FPS without tearing and V Sync would just cap it at 60 most of the time since it is a bit faster there in general. So there is no reason to not enable V Sync in Windows but on Linux the way it is handled now can dramatically change the performance. So I hope to see an override setting in nvidia-settings soon.

Turn on triple buffering by putting this in the Device section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf :

Option "TripleBuffer" "true"

You should get pretty much the same framerate as with VSync disabled, at the cost of slight increase in input lag (which will will probably be less severe than normal vsync)

Also make sure FXAA isn't forced on in nvidia-settings as it will disable triple buffering. In game supported FXAA seems to work fine.