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

[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

[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.

[freedam]

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.

Yeah! The tipical mr. wit with zero knowledge of the context of things is here!!

(ok, sorry, that was rude but i'm really sick of these useless comments)


IMHO nouveau is doing well, much of these framerates are playable. Nouveau is also very stable, at least on my 8800gt (my experience obvously). The main target should be power management now (it couldn't be used on laptops as it is now). btw kudos to the developers!

[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.

[marek]

For the VDrift racing game, the Nouveau driver is faster, but that's because the Mesa/Gallium3D drivers don't handle the open-source game shaders correctly.

That's incorrect. The NVIDIA binary driver doesn't handle the game shaders correctly. The correct behavior is to refuse to compile the shaders, because they contain 'undeclared identifier' errors. This issue seems to be fixed in the latest version of VDrift.

For old versions of VDrift, set this environment variable: force_glsl_extensions_warn=true

It's an official Mesa workaround for broken shaders in VDrift, the Unigine benchmarks, etc. By default, Mesa doesn't allow invalid shaders.

[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.