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Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Steps Up Its Game & Runs Much Faster
An anonymous reader writes "With the Linux 3.16 kernel the Nouveau driver now supports re-clocking for letting the NVIDIA GPU cores and video memory on this reverse-engineered NVIDIA driver run at their designed frequencies. Up to now the Nouveau driver has been handicapped to running at whatever (generally low) clock frequencies the video BIOS programmed the hardware to at boot time, but with Linux 3.16 is experimental support for up-clocking to the hardware-rated speeds. The results show the open-source NVIDIA driver running multiple times faster, but it doesn't work for all NVIDIA hardware, causes lock-ups for some GPUs at some frequencies, and isn't yet dynamically controlled. However, it appears to be the biggest break-through in years for this open-source NVIDIA driver that up to now has been too slow for most Linux games."
This isn't about overclocking. Most GPUs get set to a power saving speed for boot that is way below their maximal factory rated capacity. A 1GHz GPU could well be clocked at 300MHz or even lower during boot by the BIOS settings.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
BIOSes would generally set it to a default, low clock-speed.
This is for setting it to the proper (non-overclocked) speed.
I'm against the rampant indiscriminate prescription of drugs, driven by money thirsty bigpharma.
but I can tell the truth/how it is (from my perspective @ least), you're in need of drugs
Kudos to the Nouveau team for reaching this exciting milestone!
If they tested side by side with the closed source driver from Nvidia, where does this put them in terms of performance?
How long until an average user will chose the nouveau driver over the closed source driver, if said user doesn't care about licensing or building from source, but is looking for out of the box performance? Where does that put them in comparison with the Nvidia driver on Windows?
Personally, this project is not very relevant to me since I have no qualms about using the closed source driver which is good enough for my purposes, but I'm not a gamer. I really hope someone like Valve is sponsoring this development because it sounds like a lot of tedious, hard work to be doing pro bono.
Does your choice of operating system preclude your ability to construct sentences in English?
Clearly, you are a native English speaker. What happened to you, lad?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Clearly, you are a native English speaker. What happened to you, lad?
His speech double-plus good.
Obviously, the language of the future will in fact have the double-plusses in it, but it will be missing some articles. This lad is a time-traveler!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Then why do you use Linux?
I use Linux when I want to do secure things, like banking. I don't trust Microsoft to handle paypal, let alone online banking. I use windows when I want to play games. The right tool for the job. I will do some light surfing on Windows with firefox, noscript, ghostery, adblock plus, but I don't trust it* with anything important, e.g. if I see something I want to eBay I will go ahead and log into eBay so I can buy it, but I stop short of entering my paypal password and I go handle the payment later, when I'm booted into Linux.
( * OK, I trust Windows enough to dual-boot and keep the HDD connected. I suppose a malicious worm could read ext. As soon as I get this other PC recapped I'm going to move my linux disk there and it will be a non-issue.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm glad that it got fixed, but why haven't I ever before heard about this constrainment in the Nouveau driver? Once again, were the open source propellerheads so excited about open source, that they never honestly mentioned this glooming limitation in any discussions? :(
What next? "Oh, we forgot to mention that all vertex shaders have been software-emulated in Mesa for the last 10 years. Well, we've finally fixed it."
No, the year of the Linux desktop is over.
We used to have Gnome 2, KDE 2 and 3, OpenOffice, Mozilla, Flash Player and many useful tools against Windows XP. It was superior technology, but the impact was limited (LiMuX?).
OpenOffice is in ruins (and hardly better than 10 years ago), the Gnome community is split, and KDE keeps getting fatter. Meanwhile Windows 7 is a half decent operating system, and Office 2007 has upped the game considerably. Even Google targets Linux only for some of their products.
The battle for the desktop is over and lost.
Even though this is a good step in the right direction, Nouveau still isn't even stable enough for general consumption, let alone seriously competitive with features or performance of nVidia's binary-only driver.
It annoys the heck out of me that Mint switched to installing nouveau by default and especially without any alternative graphics driver option at install time, as on my laptop at least, as soon as Nouveau starts it crashes and locks up the whole PC. Trendy political correctness for (broken) open source shouldn't ever trump a binary driver if it actually works better, or especialy if it is the only option that works at all in some cases.
Add on top of that the fact that Mint devs also removed Ubuntu's boot menu option to install Linux before X starts, means the retarded decision to use nouveau by default makes it impossible for me and presumably therefore many others to install Mint from scratch without some obscure and what should be completely unnecessary hacking every time.
If even just installing Mint is borked, its really going to put off people who are trying Linux for the first time.
In prior discussions APK kept dodging questions about whether or not he has been diagnosed as mentally ill in some way by a psychologist or psychiatrist. He never would say yes or no to that one
and why in arse cunting fuck should he? what business is that of anyone about anyone on here?
More or less, that's exactly what happens.
The card's official drivers will have multiple known good power states configured - a low power, low performance configuration for an idle desktop, a high power, high performance mode for demanding games or CAD/CAM work, and something in the middle for older titles that don't need the cards full performance potential. This is what the 'adaptive' and 'prefer maximum performance' options in nvidia's windows drivers refer to.
For mine, under windows, these modes are 51Mhz, 405Mhz, and 830Mhz. With a monitoring program up (nvidia inspector) I can actually track the card stepping between these performance modes as the demands on it change. For example, at desktop it's at 51MHz. If I load chrome, I can see the card step up to 830MHz in anticipation of a high load as chrome loads its assets into video memory. Then that steps down to 405mhz as the driver realises there's no continuing load, then back down to 51Mhz a few seconds later, as the load is so low that even the 405Mhz mode is overkill.
When the machine's starting, the card isn't going to have any load placed on it. Therefore, it makes sense to start it using the low-power configuration.