GNOME Is Also Getting Fixed Up For Lower CPU Usage With NVIDIA Graphics

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNOME Is Also Getting Fixed Up For Lower CPU Usage With NVIDIA Graphics

Last week I wrote about NVIDIA contributing a fix to KDE/KWin for avoiding high CPU usage when using the proprietary GeForce graphics driver. That fix ended up being due to the KWin compositor making incorrect assumptions about GLX swap buffers behavior. It turns out GNOME also needs a similar fix...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Lower-NVIDIA-CPU-Usage

[Stenka]

Gnome in 2019... Lul. Maybe fixed and bugfree desktop in 2030.

[cl333r]

By 2025 both desktops should learn to work properly with the nvidia proprietary driver.

[Guest]

Why are these problems only happening with the NVIDIA closed source driver, and not with the open source drivers? That seems weird.

[Britoid]

Why are these problems only happening with the NVIDIA closed source driver, and not with the open source drivers? That seems weird.

The closed-source driver strictly followed a spec I'm guessing the open-source ones didn't?

[pracedru]

maybe this could be pushed as a patch to 19.04 and 18.04.

[jrch2k8]

The closed-source driver strictly followed a spec I'm guessing the open-source ones didn't?

Is actually backwards but pretty much that is it

[Mystro256]

Why are these problems only happening with the NVIDIA closed source driver, and not with the open source drivers? That seems weird.

It's not weird at all. Two reasons open source generally works better:
1) It's easier to debug open source drivers because you can see how they work and it's easier to see if the issue is in the driver or the application.
2) Open source developers are more interested in debugging open source drivers because of it's easier to suggest fixes or they can fix issues themselves.

With a closed source driver, the GNOME dev's are forced to either play trial and error, or wait for the driver developer, e.g. Nvidia, to fix the issue.

Unlike with something propriety like Windows, where they have driver developers sign NDA's to work together, GNOME does not have that option.

[Aeder]

Why are these problems only happening with the NVIDIA closed source driver, and not with the open source drivers? That seems weird.

Because with the open source drivers, you can go look at the code and find out if the driver is the one with the bad assumptions/bugs or your own code and be done.

With closed source drivers, you don't know and can't find out even if you rule out any obvious bug in your own code, and usually have to work around them, which is something no developer trying to make maintainable code wants to do. This can also lead to an attitude where bugs that only affect closed source drivers are immediately dismissed as low priority because no one wants to work on that.

[pracedru]

All though i would much rather have open source drivers for my Nvidia GFX card, I must say that their drivers works very well. In fact this performance problem is not due to Nvidia drivers, it is due to a wrong implementation in KDE and GTK.