Nouveau Driver Remains Much Slower Than NVIDIA's Official Driver

[bug77]

i think the difference is due to them having slightly DIFFERENT CHIPS
jesus

proper video card ?
i have a 8800GT and its better then most new cards

My point was exactly that: 9800GT and 9800GTX are slightly different chips, which is reflected in the performance shown using the proprietary driver. Yet there's like a 50% difference between the two when using nouveau. I don't see how that doesn't spell trouble.

As a former owner, I'm ROFL ATM at your second statement. 8800GT better then most new cards? Better than most entry level new cards, maybe. It's certainly not better than a GTX260, GTX460 or a GTX660Ti (I owned all of them) or their faster siblings. Again, my point was that if the GT220 is a member of the 200 series (I'm not sure, manufacturers often rebrand their previous generation into newer generation, low-end parts), the newest card in this comparison is four(!) generations old.

[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.

[MrRtd]

I've been using Nvidia graphics cards for several years and have been very satisfied. Nouveau driver development is interesting, but I won't try it until it is as good or better than Nvidia's proprietary driver.

[Veerappan]

My point was exactly that: 9800GT and 9800GTX are slightly different chips, which is reflected in the performance shown using the proprietary driver. Yet there's like a 50% difference between the two when using nouveau. I don't see how that doesn't spell trouble.

Re-read the article introduction. The 9800GT was stuck at the boot clock speed, and the 9800GTX was successfully re-clocked to a higher speed by Nouveau. That is a very significant reason for the difference in the benchmarks between those cards in Nouveau.

[gens]

My point was exactly that: 9800GT and 9800GTX are slightly different chips, which is reflected in the performance shown using the proprietary driver. Yet there's like a 50% difference between the two when using nouveau. I don't see how that doesn't spell trouble.

As a former owner, I'm ROFL ATM at your second statement. 8800GT better then most new cards? Better than most entry level new cards, maybe. It's certainly not better than a GTX260, GTX460 or a GTX660Ti (I owned all of them) or their faster siblings. Again, my point was that if the GT220 is a member of the 200 series (I'm not sure, manufacturers often rebrand their previous generation into newer generation, low-end parts), the newest card in this comparison is four(!) generations old.

you didnt read that 9800gtx was underclocked ?
chinese and japanese are similar too if you ask me

also 4 generations ?
maybe on paper, but not in architecture

8800 was a revolution in gpu design, at least as far as nvidia is concerned
next step was in the 400 series
next step is in the 600 series, and only the high end part
but nothing revolutionary in them

also if you look at the TDP of a GTX 260 compared to a 8800gt, youl see most its gain is in the "put more stuff on the chip die" department
8800gt is in between a 240 and 250 bout in performance and power consumption
and if this card heats my room too much i dont wanna know how much an 460 does
(edit; according to wiki not by much, 460 that is, 260 buuuuurns)

also the low end cards in the newer series are utter crap
nvidias marketing nonsenses are a prime example of big companies confusing people

[chickenlinux]

The OSS drivers work fine for general use (in most cases) but those who prefer higher-end or higher-performance cards choose the binary drivers for obvious reasons.

Neither's entirely satisfactory, and quite frankly, arguing in favor of throwing out one or the other is foolish and not well-founded. I've seen some catastrophic failures with each. Given the (insane) complexity of graphics cards and the secrecy surrounding the hardware, it's not remotely surprising that nouveau is where it is.

I think the efforts of the developers are underappreciated and could be vastly improved if NVidia would be more cooperative in providing information about their cards. Fat chance of that happening any time soon, however.

[finalzone]

Let reminds that majority of operating systems including Microsoft Windows installed from scratch use generic driver by default for common use which are no different than OSS drivers.
In that perspective, Nouveau developers deserved credits to support almost all Nvidia videocards hardware as possible rather than worrying about speed. Nouveau driver is much better than the legacy nv driver by a long shot with decent hardware acceleration. It is hardly surprising nouveau appears slower than Nvidia official driver knowing that other generic drivers from different operating system have similar performance.

[asdx]

I've been using nouveau for the last 2 years on archlinux (x86_64), on a 9500 GT.

It has never been an issue for me, thanks so much developers. I really appreciate your hard work on this amazing driver.

[Sonadow]

It doesn't seem to be "much slower", rather "reasonably fast, but slower then proprietary". Regarding trolls above, stable OSS driver will be great, even if it is 10% slower (most people wouldn't notice).

Faster trash is still trash, no matter how people want to spin it. And it's not 10% slower, it's easily 20 - 30% slower and even more under different circumstances. And GPU drivers are real complex beasts; just because they return a 15% slower performance than the blob when underclocked does not (and will not) mean that these numbers will scale accordingly when reclocking support is finally (if ever) implemented.

that companies tend to ignore.

Business 101. obsolescence drives demand. Demand drives revenue, revenue drives economies.

The only credit I'll give nouveau for is that it has reached a point where I will seriously consider not dumping it in preference of the blob for the next Linux install i'm attempting 3 weeks from now. Which is definitely much better than what I have got to say for RadeonSI.

[giliakareo]

it in flames by using wrong voltages that they have to guess.