NVIDIA GeForce 600 "Kepler" On Open-Source: It's Uselessly Slow

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA GeForce 600 "Kepler" On Open-Source: It's Uselessly Slow

With the Linux 3.8 kernel that's presently under development, the open-source reverse-engineered Nouveau driver for supporting NVIDIA graphics processors has seen some significant changes. One of the late changes was enabling Kepler acceleration support. While there is now an "out of the box" open-source GPU driver that supports the GeForce 600 GPUs with 3D/OpenGL acceleration, it's incredibly slow.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=18352

[calim]

Well, what did you expect ... at these high resolutions, the low clock speed is QUITE limiting, you won't notice any improvements with that. Not that there were any ... Xonotic seems playable, and even competitive with blob at low settings, so wouldn't call it completely useless.
And it's not like it's much slower than r600g or radeonsi either, and those are usually at max clocks, you don't call that useless. Granted, GTX680 is quite powerful.

[archibald]

Aside from Doom 3 and Nexuiz, I think it's worth celebrating that nouveau got more than 50 frames per second in all of the tests.

[ChrisXY]

Yes, I too think the title is too sensationalist. It is only slow in comparison to what it is potentially able to do and probably in comparison with performance / watt. Practically these FPS numbers are far from "uselessly slow".

[LEW21]

Wow, finally, open drivers are fast enough to run all these games with playable FPS in HD! That's a reason to celebrate!

[Pawlerson]

You're aware nouveau driver is developed without any support from Nvidia and thus your stupid article sounds like it was sponsored by them. It's uselessly stupid article btw.

[BO$$]

Stop defending incompetence. If Microsoft would have done something similar you would have said they are complete idiots but for linux you find all sorts of excuses. Just admit it already: the open source people can't write graphics drivers to save their lives. They cannot write fast optimized code. They suck at it. There is no excuse for such a performance hit. They need to learn programming first before starting to write drivers. The radeon guys have the documentation and yet they still don't get anywhere the official blobs' performance. Shitty programmers, that is all.

[calim]

Stop defending incompetence. If Microsoft would have done something similar you would have said they are complete idiots but for linux you find all sorts of excuses. Just admit it already: the open source people can't write graphics drivers to save their lives. They cannot write fast optimized code. They suck at it. There is no excuse for such a performance hit. They need to learn programming first before starting to write drivers. The radeon guys have the documentation and yet they still don't get anywhere the official blobs' performance. Shitty programmers, that is all.

No, I think we're just severely understaffed ... plus the "make it work first, make it fast later" mentality. Later is just ... very late if you have limited resources. Also, radeons are evil, they lock up if you look at them sideways (never worked on radeon but that's what it looks like from the green side) instead of telling you what you did wrong, which is I guess why some things might take longer there.

[orome]

the title is too sensationalist even for phoronix

there, fixed it for you...

[Pawlerson]

Stop defending incompetence. If Microsoft would have done something similar you would have said they are complete idiots but for linux you find all sorts of excuses. Just admit it already: the open source people can't write graphics drivers to save their lives. They cannot write fast optimized code. They suck at it. There is no excuse for such a performance hit. They need to learn programming first before starting to write drivers. The radeon guys have the documentation and yet they still don't get anywhere the official blobs' performance. Shitty programmers, that is all.

Microsoft doesn't even write graphic drivers, because its competence is limited to maintain legacy OS and add some 3D fancy effects from time to time plus more of DRM. Open Source graphic drivers developers are in far worse situation than developers from Nvidia and AMD. Open Source developers started much later and they have far less support from third party members who build their games around blobs. They're also lack of hardware and their consulting with hardware makers is on much lower level. Nevertheless, they're doing an excellent job.