Nouveau "Boost" Patches Show Much Performance Potential

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 16 April 2016 at 12:06 PM EDT. Page 5 of 5. 21 Comments.
NVIDIA vs. Nouveau Linux Boost Testing
NVIDIA vs. Nouveau Linux Boost Testing

Well, things are certainly looking bright with Karol Herbst's Nouveau driver modifications. The performance is much better than what's currently found in the mainline Linux kernel when re-clocking to the highest (0f) performance state. For many of the benchmarks, the GTX 760 and GTX 780 Ti saw their frame-rates more than doubled or even tripled in some cases.

Before getting too excited, the changes made by Karol will not be merged until at least Linux 4.7 or Linux 4.9. Additionally, it's only verified to work on Kepler graphics cards. Last but not least, you still must manually re-clock the graphics card to a fixed performance state and also manually adjust the boost state if so desired. Nevertheless, it's great to see re-clocking support advance in Nouveau step-by-step.

If you enjoyed this article consider joining Phoronix Premium to view this site ad-free, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits. PayPal or Stripe tips are also graciously accepted. Thanks for your support.

Related Articles
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.