Nouveau Driver Remains Much Slower Than NVIDIA's Official Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Nouveau Driver Remains Much Slower Than NVIDIA's Official Driver

While benchmarks this week have shown the Nouveau driver can be faster with the Linux 3.8 kernel, further benchmarks have shown that this reverse-engineered open-source driver for supporting the spectrum of NVIDIA GPUs is still at a significant loss compared to NVIDIA's official but proprietary Linux graphics driver.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=18344

[wargames]

Not to mention it can blow up your computer and burn it in flames by using wrong voltages that they have to guess.

[hoohoo]

The best thing the nouveau driver developers could do is to make the driver easier to uninstall after a Linux install.

Anyone who pays good money for a video card and then uses an inferior and incomplete driver (nouveau or whatever the AMD FOSS driver is called) instead of vendors proprietary driver is either a fool or a foaming-at-the-mouth Open Source purist.

No, this is not sarcasm. None of the opensource NV or AMD drivers are worth a damn. People writing them seem to me like the people who lovingly craft clones of, say, the Mac OS launch bar.

[gamerk2]

The best thing the nouveau driver developers could do is to make the driver easier to uninstall after a Linux install.

Anyone who pays good money for a video card and then uses an inferior and incomplete driver (nouveau or whatever the AMD FOSS driver is called) instead of vendors proprietary driver is either a fool or a foaming-at-the-mouth Open Source purist.

No, this is not sarcasm. None of the opensource NV or AMD drivers are worth a damn. People writing them seem to me like the people who lovingly craft clones of, say, the Mac OS launch bar.

In before the thread derailment. :P

[ChrisXY]

hoohoo,

I have used the open source radeon driver on my previous notebook for practical reasons. Some of these are:

• fglrx sometimes just hangs the GPU. Google "ASIC hang happened". This happens too often to be acceptable
• The randr implementation was bad. I often god incorrect or even impossible xrandr outputs (like two preferred modes). This was a notebook, I was obviously going to connect it to many external displays
• It would very often not wake up correctly from suspend. Google "fglrx suspend". This was a notebook, I was going to suspend it all the time
• Why am I even trying, just google it. After months of testing to make really sure that the driver is out of date on release it still ends up with bugs like http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=177 in the release all the time

The open source driver had none of that problems. None as in zero. It had slightly higher power usage but not so much that it actually mattered and the performance was of course not quite es good.

So tell me again, between the developers of fglrx and the developers of the open source radeon drivers, who is not "worth a damn"? And please tell me again how I am a "foaming-at-the-mouth Open Source purist" for preferring free software with the additional bonus that every single basic feature works better whereas the closed source "official" driver was basically unusable for everything I did.

[GT220]

Nouveau developers are retarded, trying to reinvent the wheel, wasting valuable resource and time instead of working on other parts of Linux that needs improvement.

Time to take this garbage out and throw it into the dustbin of history where it belongs.

[Larven]

Nouveau developers are retarded, trying to reinvent the wheel, wasting valuable resource and time instead of working on other parts of Linux that needs improvement.

Time to take this garbage out and throw it into the dustbin of history where it belongs.

Linux developers usually works in what they like. Nouveau developers likes grahpics drivers and nvidia, but they cant contribute to the nvidia closed driver. Do you think if nouveau didnt exist they will work on what YOU think is most important? Most of they are doing this for free, say thanks or nothing, because you are not forced to use nouveau at all.

English is not my natural language, sorry if something is not well understood.

[a user]

Nouveau developers are retarded, trying to reinvent the wheel, wasting valuable resource and time instead of working on other parts of Linux that needs improvement.

Time to take this garbage out and throw it into the dustbin of history where it belongs.

i wish someone would do that with folks like you instead.

[Brane215]

Nouveau developers are retarded, trying to reinvent the wheel, wasting valuable resource and time instead of working on other parts of Linux that needs improvement.

Time to take this garbage out and throw it into the dustbin of history where it belongs.

Well, if they are retarded, you are braindead.

You HAVE to have control over your hardware. It wasn't just once that people have found hairraising covert security holes in binary blobs, and nVidia has been mentioned more than once in that context.

While I understand some of the woes at open source effort, I have to acknowledge difficulty of working with so cpmplex stuff under conditions of cronic and critical lack of documentation all the time.

Just look at AMD's documentation ( since they claim publically support for open source and open documentation) and try to make head and tails out of that.

nVidia and AMD get plenty of cash from hardvare. Compared to that, Open-source developers effort lives almost from public mercy.

And still ( while I don't know aboot Nouveau ) open source radeon driver is not half bad. Eyefinity works for me superbly ( 3 x 1600x1200 ). 3D is not that bad. 2D is great. It works without a problem on all kernels I cared to try, even the freshest ones, compiled straight a few hours after release or git copies. ONly thing that is still missing for me on radeon is good GPGPU interface.

Not so with closed-source fglrx. It's full of bugs, some of them persist through many versions over multiple year timespan and quite annoying. It is not always easy ( or even possible) to nail right combination of kernel, driver, libraries and xorg server to make it work.

I switched recently from radeon to fglrx only to get choked on bugs and instabilities. For the moment I am persisting as I want to play with GPGPU stuff, but at very first day radeon includes support for it, I am switching back.

[pingufunkybeat]

The best thing the nouveau driver developers could do is to make the driver easier to uninstall after a Linux install.

Anyone who pays good money for a video card and then uses an inferior and incomplete driver (nouveau or whatever the AMD FOSS driver is called) instead of vendors proprietary driver is either a fool or a foaming-at-the-mouth Open Source purist.

If you find uninstalling a driver too much work, perhaps you should use a different operating system?

I suggest XBox 360, it has lots of FPS