Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Steps Up Its Game & Runs Much Faster 143
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."
No overclocking (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No overclocking (Score:4, Informative)
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.
And it's a damned good thing, too. When clocked lower and only displaying text the GPU is using the absolute lowest amount of power. If you're having problems with PCIE VRM (badcaps!) then the system will often come up to the GUI and then fail, but you can still use the text interface to troubleshoot, for example changing BIOS settings around and the like while chasing the problem.
Re:Overclocking is Recommended? (Score:2, Informative)
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.