Nouveau NVD0-Fermi Is Still A Busted Mess

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 21 December 2011 at 01:51 AM EST. Page 3 of 3. 8 Comments.

Only a few times was I lucky enough to get any OpenGL games running on the NVIDIA GeForce GT 520 with the latest code, but it ultimately went awry and there were also some OpenGL rendering problems with the latest Nouveau Gallium3D code for Fermi. Obviously though we did not make it far enough to be able to complete any new graphics benchmarks.

Sadly the open-source driver support for these latest Fermi GPUs is still a mess. Seeing as we're still a few weeks out from the Linux 3.3 kernel merge window and that Mesa 7.12/8.0 hasn't been branched from master yet, it's possible we will see the NVD0 support improve by the time these driver components are released, but we'll need to wait and see. For now if you want a discrete graphics card with reliable open-source support under Linux, you are definitely best off with a Radeon graphics card. If you insist on going with NVIDIA hardware, the GeForce 9 series through the GeForce 200 series seems to be the best supported now, but Nouveau is a game of Russian Roulette depending upon the configuration.

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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.