Nouveau Memory Re-Clocking Comes For More NVIDIA GPUs

Roy Spliet, the student developer behind funded by the X.Org Foundation to work on Nouveau re-clocking, continues making great progress on this critical feature for the open-source NVIDIA graphics driver. With the latest patches, DDR2 / DDR3 / GDDR3 memory re-clocking should be working for a lot more NVIDIA graphics cards.

Roy has been publishing many patches to improve re-clocking support for some slightly older NVIDIA GPUs. Today this work has built up to implementing re-clocking for NVA3 / NVA5 / NVA8 hardware with DDR2, DDR3, and GDDR3 video memory. Roy so far has tested his code with a half-dozen graphics cards to success and thinks it should work on many more graphics cards too.

The NVA3, NVA5, and NVA8 are also known as the GT215, GT216, and GT218, respectively. These pre-Fermi graphics processors are found in what's marketed by NVIDIA as the GeForce 200 and 300 series. Unfortunately for those with GDDR5 versions of these GPUs, there's other issues to be worked out. Additionally, Roy reports of some stability issues when re-clocking under certain circumstances and there's also some NVIDIA DDR2 graphics cards producing corruption at their highest performance state.

With there being no automatic re-clocking yet for Nouveau, those wishing to try out these patches (or the Nouveau support in general) on recent kernels can see the re-clocking steps.

For those with affected hardware wishing to try out the memory re-clocking support, unfortunately these patches are likely too late for drm-next for Linux 3.18 given the tighter drm-next pull requirements, but at least this has us already looking forward to Linux 3.19 over the winter months. Those wanting to spin their own patched kernel or wishing to learn more about Roy's re-clocking adventure, the newest patches are on the Nouveau mailing list.