Running The New Open-Source NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series Support In Linux 6.2

First up was trying out the GeForce RTX 30 series Nouveau support using the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti... With the signed firmware in place, building a Linux 6.2 Git build, and running Mesa Git from Oibaf PPA, the system booted and hit the GNOME desktop with OpenGL acceleration!

Immediately though it was noticed that the RTX 3060 Ti was only mode-setting to 2560 x 1440 rather than the native 4K that worked fine with the proprietary NVIDIA driver.

Ignoring the mode-setting issue, poking around I was quickly reminded of the lack of re-clocking support with the sluggish performance... Like with the GeForce GTX 900 series and later GPUs, currently the Nouveau driver is limited to running at its (limited) boot clock frequencies and can't be re-clocked to the higher performance states for actually running the graphics cards at their rated speeds.

So the performance of the RTX 30 cards is very slow with running only at a fraction of the rated speeds. But once the GSP support is all sorted out hopefully this will address this long-standing bottleneck for the Nouveau driver project and major barrier to its usage. Until then the best open-source NVIDIA upstream support remains with the GeForce GTX 600/700 series where at least the cards can be manually re-clocked to their highest performance state -- no dynamic re-clocking yet for actually enjoying the behavior with other drivers/GPUs of adjusting the performance state based on the actual needs/load.

Trying out the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3090 cards on this initial open-source NVIDIA driver stack in Linux 6.2 was unsuccessful. The Plymouth boot splash screen would appear but when hitting the GNOME desktop the screen would remain black.

So for this initial open-source GeForce RTX 30 series testing on Linux 6.2 I just used the RTX 3060 Ti for providing a first look at the Nouveau performance... The Linux 6.2 + Mesa 23.0-devel performance of the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti was compared to the same hardware running then on the NVIDIA 525.60.11 proprietary driver.