Talk:Nouveau

Add a note for new users, that the nouveau driver is significantly slower and is missing features (Vulkan)?

It is (much) slower even on cards with basic power management for manual reclocking, see the usual phoronix.com benchmarks for example.

Of course we could also describe the reasons, for fairness, because mainly Nvidia is blocking the development.

G3ro (talk) 14:39, 17 October 2020 (UTC) G3ro

Can I add such a note or section? And what form would you prefer, a sentence in the introduction or a new section "Features" or something else?

G3ro (talk) 17:28, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

It would be useful if you could create something like a draft with the content you intend to add, including links supporting the claims, so we can get a better idea about how much content we're talking about. -- Lahwaacz (talk) 22:36, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

Well links are always a problem with Xorg and freedesktop projects in general, the information situation is always pretty bad.

In general it is a known fact, that the Power Management of Nouveau is the biggest problem (cards without it are veery slow) and even cards with experimental (manual) reclocking support are still slower (only source I have for now is phoronix comparison between nvidia and nouveau).

Regarding Vulkan support, also phoronix article, quote: "and there isn't yet any working Nouveau Vulkan driver".

There is not much more to say, because the rest (of features) seems to be included in the linked matrix.

G3ro (talk) 19:43, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

Basically it would be two sentences stating something like: "Be aware that for now Nouveau is significantly slower on most cards (see also: link to phoronix), this is mainly because of missing or incomplete support for power management."

" For now Nouveau does not support Vulkan (and OpenGL versions >4.4) (see also: link to phoronix)."

In addition we could add a sentence or section talking about the development process and that because of missing support by Nvidia the devs need to find out things by themselves, which also led to fewer developers.

G3ro (talk) 14:29, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

I think adding a prominent note at the top about incompatibility and missing features with modern GPUs is more important now than ever before given that RTX 3000 (~2 years old, and upcoming RTX 4000) are completely unsupported and essential features like power management (!!) and even basic 2D & video are still unavailable on even 6 year old cards thanks to NVIDIA.

Alpyne (talk) 05:13, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

"Power management" is out of date?

The power management section does not give me a true picture of the situation. The wiki says "since kernel 4.5 can be controlled through a debugfs interface located at /sys/kernel/debug/dri/*/pstate.". But cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/pstate notifies about the absence of the device.

Also, I can't find information anywhere except in archwiki that power managment is an experimental feature and you need to act carefully.

But on the freedesrktop website itself, I see the information "Staring with Linux 6.7 users of Turing and Ampere GPUs can use nouveau.config=NvGspRm=1 to enable power management. It's enabled by default on Ada Lovelace and newer."

https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/PowerManagement.html

Maybe need to add information about Ampere, Turing and Ada Lovelace, and instead of information about experimentation, add simply "that it is thought to be fully implemented. May contain bugs"? Or is this feature experimental anyway? Vlad1.96 (talk) 11:03, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

NVK appears to perform significantly better than proprietary drivers in some regards.

Something I noticed while installing this driver, is the apparent lack of stuttering/microstuttering with NVK, which seem to appear in virtually every game when using proprietary drivers. I know that there currently do not seem to be a lot of people expressing this opinion or experiencing issues with proprietary drivers, but I believe this to be due to the tiny scale that these stutters are appearing at, to the point where you can become numb to these stutters once you are used to them. I don't know what is causing them, but I have completely switched PCs and Monitors as well as cables, trying tips/tricks as well as different arch-based distros that claim to optimize these drivers for perfomance, with the result always being the same: Very slight stuttering regardless of the amount of fps (I am using 240hz). These are probably almost unnoticeable at 60hz but I know that I am not hallucinating. On games that give me 500k+ fps, the NVK driver has absolutely zero stuttering and is buttery smooth, which cannot be said for proprietary drivers on the same titles. Due to having switched to fully different hardware, I don't believe these results to be hardware-related. One way I could imagine proving these results is to record the screen with a slow motion camera, however I do not own such a camera and have no way of getting my hands on one of them.

I am partly making this comment to motivate others to try NVK, especially in games where their max fps with these drivers is well above their refresh rate. It appears that in some games, NVK is already superior to proprietary drivers, and they give me a much better and smoother gaming experience than any possible configuration of official drivers ever has, despite the overall fps loss that exists. Timeattack (talk) 23:27, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

When I tried to run Counter-Strike 2 using NVK, I got a kernel panic. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ andreymal (talk) 01:26, 24 June 2024 (UTC)