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Nouveau are doing their best to reverse-engineer cards. NVIDIA doesn't help at all, not providing any docs and not interacting with the rest of the community. O

Nouveau are doing their best to reverse-engineer cards. NVIDIA doesn't help at all, not providing any docs and not interacting with the rest of the community. On the other hand, Intel and AMD have high-quality drivers and are part of the open-source community.

vfq 8y ago
Nvidia is already helping the Nouveau maintainers by not suing them for all they are worth.
- contravariant 8y ago
  Hey, I think you're being downvoted a bit harshly for your statement so I've decided to help you out by not suing you. Cheers.
gnarbarian 8y ago
Ya. It's too bad their hardware isn't more competitive. I am definitely rooting for AMD to wow us next generation like they did in the CPU market. Things are getting far better for OSS you drivers. If you wanted any 3d acceleration in the past your only choice was the proprietary Nvidia driver or a broken proprietary ATI driver. (The ATI windows drivers were pretty buggy too during this period). Back then the proprietary Nvidia driver kept much better Pace with their windows offering. Last I checked their proprietary Linux driver was almost a year behind (point release wise) the windows offering.
- beatgammit 8y ago
  AMD GPU hardware is definitely competitive, they just aren't top of the line. At the mid range, they are very competitive, and that's what most people need anyway. My next GPU will be an AMD GPU, as soon as my GTX 960 stops being sufficient (and no Wayland is certainly an issue).
- magic_quotes 8y ago
  > Back then the proprietary Nvidia driver kept much better Pace with their windows offering. Last I checked their proprietary Linux driver was almost a year behind (point release wise) the windows offering. Am I reading this right? Nvidia's drivers were never out of sync for a year with regard to the supported GPUs, OpenGL and Vulkan features. It's easy to see that looking at the Vulkan beta drivers page at https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan-driver https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan-driver. (That's just a convenient example, non-beta drivers follow the same cadence but there no single page I can link.)
- zanny 8y ago
  In the last 6 years I've used a 7870, 290, and 580 as my desktops GPU. All have been stellar cards that have only gotten better over time. Back when I got that 7870 circa 2012 I was taking a major risk - at the time the 6870 was the premiere foss card and radeonSI was brand new with growing pains. The 290 was another risk being the first major architecture update to GCN. But I was validated in both purchases with usable cards at first that within a few months became excellent. I've played a lot of the major Linux AAA releases on these cards shortly after release - Borderlands 2, Civ 5, Metro Last Light / Redux, Tomb Raider, etc. There used to be quite a few bugs at release and glitches. Nowadays everything is pristine. And I get about twice the framerate in BL2 today than I did four years ago on that 290. I'm almost certainly going to buy a Navi card next unless we have another crypto bomb ruin the market again.
- gnulinux 8y ago
  AMD GPUs are definitely competitive unless you made a business out of computing things in GPU. For most daily tasks like graphics (games) or even moderate number crunching (OpenCL), AMD GPUs are perfectly usable and high value.
  - jammygit 8y ago
    How big is the gap between opencl and cuda right now?
    - zozbot123 8y ago
      These days Vulkan can be used for compute as well, and it gives the user a far more refined interface than OpenCL. There's very little reason to limit oneself to the latter.
      - gnulinux 8y ago
        Any Vulkan library you can suggest? Last time I checked Vulkan, it required enormous amount of boilerplate just to connect GPU, compile, send data and run code. So, I ended up using OpenCL for years. Unless there are good high level libraries around I would still stick to OpenCL.
- MrRadar 8y ago
  > I am definitely rooting for AMD to wow us next generation like they did in the CPU market. Don't set your expectations too high. Their next generation of consumer graphics cards, rumored to be announced at CES next week, are reportedly still going to be based on a new revision of their current GCN architecture (which originally debuted in 2011 and is very much showing its age these days). Rumored performance for the "high-end" model will be somewhere around the GTX 1080 or RTX 2070 (though reportedly at a much lower price compared to either of those cards). If you're waiting for them to produce an all-new GPU architecture the rumors are that they are working on one to be launched in the 2020-2021 timeframe. That's also when Intel is rumored to be preparing to launch their own dedicated GPUs so hopefully we will be going from 0 properly high-end GPUs with open-source drivers to 2 by 2021.
  - hedora 8y ago
    I got an amd fury x a while back because the nvidia binary drivers regressed severely with my old card, and I wanted 4K anyway. It’s by far the best Linux GPU I’ve ever encountered, and that’s with open source drivers don’t set the kernel taint bit. Its performance in benchmarks was much better than the comparably priced NVIDIA. It is also the quietest gamer GPU I’ve encountered (I bought one with slightly nicer fans). Maybe things have changed (but the 1080 was certainly out back then), but this card wins on every metric other than CUDA support (nonexistent) and absolute performance (close enough to fastest, and certainly overkill for my Linux Steam collection at 4K).
    - MrRadar 8y ago
      I'm not saying that AMD's current cards are slouches (I'm planning to buy one myself this year when I build my next computer) but they certainly do not meet the performance bar set by Nvidia's current high-end models (the RTX 2080 Ti and Titan RTX) which is what I mean by "properly high-end". Those are admittedly niche products due to their high pricing but it is important for AMD to have a competitive product in that segment since many people don't do a lot of research and if all they know about GPUs is "Nvidia has the fastest cards" (or an equally-uninformed salesperson tells them that) and buys a 1060 over a 580 based on that "knowledge" then AMD lost a sale.
- arendtio 8y ago
  In fact, when buying graphics cards I am looking much more on the driver support than on the pure FPS performance. I have a Dell XPS with NVIDIA graphics and an AMD RX460 in my desktop PC. And in my experience, the NVIDIA driver landscape is just a mess. The state of Nouveau can be obtained from the article above and the proprietary driver causes all kinds of weird issues (e.g. UI spinners rotating at different speeds, fans turning faster than they are supposed to be, etc.). On the other hand, the (open source) AMD driver seems to have evolved quite well over the last years. As a result, I hate my NVIDIA card and like my AMD card quite much. Every time I see those steam survey results I wonder why there are still so many people buying NVIDIA cards for their Linux boxes. They probably just trust the benchmarks and don't compare the experience first hand.
koolba 8y ago
What’s the rationale for NVIDIA for this? As the whole point is to expose hardware features through an API, what do they gain by keeping it closed? Are there features implemented purely in software?
- gmueckl 8y ago
  The most commonly used APIs for graphics (X11 with all the "accelerated" rendering, OpenGL) match the actual current GPU hardware so poorly that most of the driver bloat is about dealing with that mismatch in the most efficient and transparent way possible. The drivers also must contain a collection of compilers and assemblers and other stuff (because the OpenGL spec says so). So there is a lot of secret sauce type stuff in there that these companies don't want you to know about. Whether this is justified is a completely different question.
- josefx 8y ago
  The code might expose the implementation for a lot of NVIDIA specific features and libraries. Having that open and possibly ported to other hardware would not be in NVIDIAs interest.
wbond 8y ago
I see it repeated all the time that AMD has great open source drivers, but their latest drivers on their 5xx line card couldn’t run my 4K display at 60hz over Display Port without splitting the screen into two separate X displays. Nvidia’s proprietary driver can handle it no problem. Needless to say I have an AMD card, with awesome open source drivers, sitting in a bin. While the horrid binary-blob Nvidia actually drives my display.
- apayan 8y ago
  That's a curious situation. I run my 4k displays over DisplayPort with an RX 580 on Ubuntu 18.04. However, I haven't gone out of my way to obtain drivers from AMD. I'm just using the drivers that ship with the kernel. It might be worth trying a vanilla installation of Ubuntu to see if you can get your set up working.
  - wbond 8y ago
    I did try both the kernel open source drivers and AMD’s pro edition. Most likely you aren’t using Display Port 1.2 MST, which is what the Dell UP3214Q requires for 60hz 4K. My testing was with vanilla Ubuntu 18.04.
AnssiH 8y ago
> NVIDIA doesn't help at all, not providing any docs and not interacting with the rest of the community. That is simply not true. Various docs, provided based on requests by Nouveau developers: https://download.nvidia.com/open-gpu-doc/ https://download.nvidia.com/open-gpu-doc/ Documentation released in the last year include e.g. https://download.nvidia.com/open-gpu-doc/MemoryTweakTable/1/MemoryTweakTable.html https://download.nvidia.com/open-gpu-doc/MemoryTweakTable/1/... https://download.nvidia.com/open-gpu-doc/MemoryClockTable/1/MemoryClockTable.html https://download.nvidia.com/open-gpu-doc/MemoryClockTable/1/... https://download.nvidia.com/open-gpu-doc/BIOS-Information-Table/1/BIOS-Information-Table.html https://download.nvidia.com/open-gpu-doc/BIOS-Information-Ta... The announcement of the first piece of documentation in 2013: https://www.mail-archive.com/nouveau@lists.freedesktop.org/msg14005.html https://www.mail-archive.com/nouveau@lists.freedesktop.org/m... Commits with @nvidia.com addresses (including Reviewed-By tags etc.) to nouveau driver: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/drivers/gpu/drm/nouveau?qt=grep&q=%40nvidia.com https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... You can also regularly see posts by NVIDIA employees on the nouveau mailing list. Sure, they are contributing nowhere near as much as AMD or Intel, but to say they are not interacting at all or not providing any docs or not helping at all is clearly false.
- slavik81 8y ago
  It's true they don't literally do nothing, but are Noveau developers getting the information they need about newer hardware? I think these benchmarks are illuminating: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nouveau-nvidia-eoy2018&num=2 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nouveau-... You get 3x better performance with a GTX 780 Ti than a GTX 980 Ti. From reading the explanation from a Nouveau developer in the comments, I get the impression that NVIDIA just wants the open source drivers to work well enough that you can boot your computer and download the proprietary drivers.
  - AnssiH 8y ago
    I think the biggest missing piece currently is signed PMU firmware for GM20x to allow reclocking, which NVIDIA has not released and does not seem to currently be planning to (even though they have released some other GM20x firmware). This post from a Nouveau developer a year ago provides a summary, which I think is probably still accurate: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-drivers/open-source-nvidia-linux-nouveau/998310-nouveau-persevered-in-2017-for-open-source-nvidia-but-2018-could-be-much-better/page4 https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-d...
espeed 8y ago
For those closer to the hardware with insight into the emerging architectures and market dynamics, how far away is AMD/Intel/IBM/Google from catching NVIDIA from a technology perspective, and does NVIDIA have a defensible competitive advantage now that market forces have moved well beyond gaming and shifted US strategy toward a spending spree of buying up all IP?

vfq 8y ago

Nvidia is already helping the Nouveau maintainers by not suing them for all they are worth.

contravariant 8y ago
Hey, I think you're being downvoted a bit harshly for your statement so I've decided to help you out by not suing you. Cheers.

gnarbarian 8y ago

Ya. It's too bad their hardware isn't more competitive. I am definitely rooting for AMD to wow us next generation like they did in the CPU market. Things are getting far better for OSS you drivers. If you wanted any 3d acceleration in the past your only choice was the proprietary Nvidia driver or a broken proprietary ATI driver. (The ATI windows drivers were pretty buggy too during this period). Back then the proprietary Nvidia driver kept much better Pace with their windows offering. Last I checked their proprietary Linux driver was almost a year behind (point release wise) the windows offering.

beatgammit 8y ago
AMD GPU hardware is definitely competitive, they just aren't top of the line. At the mid range, they are very competitive, and that's what most people need anyway. My next GPU will be an AMD GPU, as soon as my GTX 960 stops being sufficient (and no Wayland is certainly an issue).
magic_quotes 8y ago
> Back then the proprietary Nvidia driver kept much better Pace with their windows offering. Last I checked their proprietary Linux driver was almost a year behind (point release wise) the windows offering. Am I reading this right? Nvidia's drivers were never out of sync for a year with regard to the supported GPUs, OpenGL and Vulkan features. It's easy to see that looking at the Vulkan beta drivers page at https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan-driver https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan-driver. (That's just a convenient example, non-beta drivers follow the same cadence but there no single page I can link.)
zanny 8y ago
In the last 6 years I've used a 7870, 290, and 580 as my desktops GPU. All have been stellar cards that have only gotten better over time. Back when I got that 7870 circa 2012 I was taking a major risk - at the time the 6870 was the premiere foss card and radeonSI was brand new with growing pains. The 290 was another risk being the first major architecture update to GCN. But I was validated in both purchases with usable cards at first that within a few months became excellent. I've played a lot of the major Linux AAA releases on these cards shortly after release - Borderlands 2, Civ 5, Metro Last Light / Redux, Tomb Raider, etc. There used to be quite a few bugs at release and glitches. Nowadays everything is pristine. And I get about twice the framerate in BL2 today than I did four years ago on that 290. I'm almost certainly going to buy a Navi card next unless we have another crypto bomb ruin the market again.
gnulinux 8y ago
AMD GPUs are definitely competitive unless you made a business out of computing things in GPU. For most daily tasks like graphics (games) or even moderate number crunching (OpenCL), AMD GPUs are perfectly usable and high value.
- jammygit 8y ago
  How big is the gap between opencl and cuda right now?
  - zozbot123 8y ago
    These days Vulkan can be used for compute as well, and it gives the user a far more refined interface than OpenCL. There's very little reason to limit oneself to the latter.
    - gnulinux 8y ago
      Any Vulkan library you can suggest? Last time I checked Vulkan, it required enormous amount of boilerplate just to connect GPU, compile, send data and run code. So, I ended up using OpenCL for years. Unless there are good high level libraries around I would still stick to OpenCL.
MrRadar 8y ago
> I am definitely rooting for AMD to wow us next generation like they did in the CPU market. Don't set your expectations too high. Their next generation of consumer graphics cards, rumored to be announced at CES next week, are reportedly still going to be based on a new revision of their current GCN architecture (which originally debuted in 2011 and is very much showing its age these days). Rumored performance for the "high-end" model will be somewhere around the GTX 1080 or RTX 2070 (though reportedly at a much lower price compared to either of those cards). If you're waiting for them to produce an all-new GPU architecture the rumors are that they are working on one to be launched in the 2020-2021 timeframe. That's also when Intel is rumored to be preparing to launch their own dedicated GPUs so hopefully we will be going from 0 properly high-end GPUs with open-source drivers to 2 by 2021.
- hedora 8y ago
  I got an amd fury x a while back because the nvidia binary drivers regressed severely with my old card, and I wanted 4K anyway. It’s by far the best Linux GPU I’ve ever encountered, and that’s with open source drivers don’t set the kernel taint bit. Its performance in benchmarks was much better than the comparably priced NVIDIA. It is also the quietest gamer GPU I’ve encountered (I bought one with slightly nicer fans). Maybe things have changed (but the 1080 was certainly out back then), but this card wins on every metric other than CUDA support (nonexistent) and absolute performance (close enough to fastest, and certainly overkill for my Linux Steam collection at 4K).
  - MrRadar 8y ago
    I'm not saying that AMD's current cards are slouches (I'm planning to buy one myself this year when I build my next computer) but they certainly do not meet the performance bar set by Nvidia's current high-end models (the RTX 2080 Ti and Titan RTX) which is what I mean by "properly high-end". Those are admittedly niche products due to their high pricing but it is important for AMD to have a competitive product in that segment since many people don't do a lot of research and if all they know about GPUs is "Nvidia has the fastest cards" (or an equally-uninformed salesperson tells them that) and buys a 1060 over a 580 based on that "knowledge" then AMD lost a sale.
arendtio 8y ago
In fact, when buying graphics cards I am looking much more on the driver support than on the pure FPS performance. I have a Dell XPS with NVIDIA graphics and an AMD RX460 in my desktop PC. And in my experience, the NVIDIA driver landscape is just a mess. The state of Nouveau can be obtained from the article above and the proprietary driver causes all kinds of weird issues (e.g. UI spinners rotating at different speeds, fans turning faster than they are supposed to be, etc.). On the other hand, the (open source) AMD driver seems to have evolved quite well over the last years. As a result, I hate my NVIDIA card and like my AMD card quite much. Every time I see those steam survey results I wonder why there are still so many people buying NVIDIA cards for their Linux boxes. They probably just trust the benchmarks and don't compare the experience first hand.

koolba 8y ago

What’s the rationale for NVIDIA for this? As the whole point is to expose hardware features through an API, what do they gain by keeping it closed? Are there features implemented purely in software?

gmueckl 8y ago
The most commonly used APIs for graphics (X11 with all the "accelerated" rendering, OpenGL) match the actual current GPU hardware so poorly that most of the driver bloat is about dealing with that mismatch in the most efficient and transparent way possible. The drivers also must contain a collection of compilers and assemblers and other stuff (because the OpenGL spec says so). So there is a lot of secret sauce type stuff in there that these companies don't want you to know about. Whether this is justified is a completely different question.
josefx 8y ago
The code might expose the implementation for a lot of NVIDIA specific features and libraries. Having that open and possibly ported to other hardware would not be in NVIDIAs interest.

wbond 8y ago

I see it repeated all the time that AMD has great open source drivers, but their latest drivers on their 5xx line card couldn’t run my 4K display at 60hz over Display Port without splitting the screen into two separate X displays. Nvidia’s proprietary driver can handle it no problem. Needless to say I have an AMD card, with awesome open source drivers, sitting in a bin. While the horrid binary-blob Nvidia actually drives my display.

apayan 8y ago
That's a curious situation. I run my 4k displays over DisplayPort with an RX 580 on Ubuntu 18.04. However, I haven't gone out of my way to obtain drivers from AMD. I'm just using the drivers that ship with the kernel. It might be worth trying a vanilla installation of Ubuntu to see if you can get your set up working.
- wbond 8y ago
  I did try both the kernel open source drivers and AMD’s pro edition. Most likely you aren’t using Display Port 1.2 MST, which is what the Dell UP3214Q requires for 60hz 4K. My testing was with vanilla Ubuntu 18.04.

AnssiH 8y ago

> NVIDIA doesn't help at all, not providing any docs and not interacting with the rest of the community. That is simply not true. Various docs, provided based on requests by Nouveau developers: https://download.nvidia.com/open-gpu-doc/ https://download.nvidia.com/open-gpu-doc/ Documentation released in the last year include e.g. https://download.nvidia.com/open-gpu-doc/MemoryTweakTable/1/MemoryTweakTable.html https://download.nvidia.com/open-gpu-doc/MemoryTweakTable/1/... https://download.nvidia.com/open-gpu-doc/MemoryClockTable/1/MemoryClockTable.html https://download.nvidia.com/open-gpu-doc/MemoryClockTable/1/... https://download.nvidia.com/open-gpu-doc/BIOS-Information-Table/1/BIOS-Information-Table.html https://download.nvidia.com/open-gpu-doc/BIOS-Information-Ta... The announcement of the first piece of documentation in 2013: https://www.mail-archive.com/nouveau@lists.freedesktop.org/msg14005.html https://www.mail-archive.com/nouveau@lists.freedesktop.org/m... Commits with @nvidia.com addresses (including Reviewed-By tags etc.) to nouveau driver: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/drivers/gpu/drm/nouveau?qt=grep&q=%40nvidia.com https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... You can also regularly see posts by NVIDIA employees on the nouveau mailing list. Sure, they are contributing nowhere near as much as AMD or Intel, but to say they are not interacting at all or not providing any docs or not helping at all is clearly false.

slavik81 8y ago
It's true they don't literally do nothing, but are Noveau developers getting the information they need about newer hardware? I think these benchmarks are illuminating: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nouveau-nvidia-eoy2018&num=2 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nouveau-... You get 3x better performance with a GTX 780 Ti than a GTX 980 Ti. From reading the explanation from a Nouveau developer in the comments, I get the impression that NVIDIA just wants the open source drivers to work well enough that you can boot your computer and download the proprietary drivers.
- AnssiH 8y ago
  I think the biggest missing piece currently is signed PMU firmware for GM20x to allow reclocking, which NVIDIA has not released and does not seem to currently be planning to (even though they have released some other GM20x firmware). This post from a Nouveau developer a year ago provides a summary, which I think is probably still accurate: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-drivers/open-source-nvidia-linux-nouveau/998310-nouveau-persevered-in-2017-for-open-source-nvidia-but-2018-could-be-much-better/page4 https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-d...

espeed 8y ago

For those closer to the hardware with insight into the emerging architectures and market dynamics, how far away is AMD/Intel/IBM/Google from catching NVIDIA from a technology perspective, and does NVIDIA have a defensible competitive advantage now that market forces have moved well beyond gaming and shifted US strategy toward a spending spree of buying up all IP?