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."
Performance vs Closed source driver? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Performance vs Closed source driver? (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
When it is stable? The damn thing kept crashing on me one or two times a day which is why I switched to the proprietary driver. Now I'm back to using the Nouveau driver with a new Nvidia card and it only crashes one or two times a month which is just about stable enough to not make me bother with the proprietary one.
Where does that put them in comparison with the Nvidia driver on Windows?
The Windows driver is somewhat more stable, I regard stability as an aspect of performance.