3 ms·

What is slow in this case? 1% of the NVidia driver performance or 70%? I could stomach some hit to performance to drop the binary blob.

samus 3y ago
~5% is what Nouveau managed without GSP. According to a Phoronix forum post I can't find right now, with GSP it's something like 10% to 20% percent of the proprietary driver. Michael Larabel will surely publish numbers soon that are a bit more reliable.
- fbdab103 3y ago
  Ouch. That's a bit more than I am willing to handle.
  - samus 3y ago
    Nouveau was already functional for desktop usage though, apart from certain bugs and limitations. If you just can't stand using the proprietary driver and don't need gaming or compute performance, go for it!
    - jakobson14 3y ago
      Should note, you currently _can_ (or will soon) get gaming and compute through vulkan or rusticl. It's just not currently very fast, yet.
- petermcneeley 3y ago
  If you only get 5% of the power of the device why not simply use the CPUs?
  - SXX 3y ago
    Because you want your system installer or LiveUSBs to work without running GPU in VGA mode at 640×480. Also you get this 5% performance when GPU is clocked at 10% power draw.
    - petermcneeley 3y ago
      Yes but you would go pretty far with a integrated intel if you are only getting 5%
- SXX 3y ago
  It was ~5% because there was no reclocking whatsoever without GSP support. Nouveau was never most performant driver, but developers still been able to achieve something like 50-80% performance on 6xx 7xx series cards before Nvidia started to signed firmware shenanigans. It's not like I defending the driver performance, but considering for decades it was purely reverse engineering effort by skeleton team < 10 people their achievements are outstanding.
  - samus 3y ago
    I agree. For years the effort was destined to only ever achieve 10% max of its potential performance. Also, there were architectural changes which probably rendered previous optimizations ineffectual.
- jakobson14 3y ago
  https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-drivers/open-source-nvidia-linux-nouveau/1422015-rust-written-nak-compiler-merged-for-nouveau-nvk-in-mesa-24-0#post1422080 https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-d... It depended a LOT on the workload. valley? 20% glmark2? 91% vkmark? 11% To some degree this is probably just the vulkan driver and compiler being really, really immature. I expect that the gap will become a LOT closer in the next 6 months, or whenever they get past implementing vulkan 1.3 in the compiler and can put some work into cleanup.

samus 3y ago

~5% is what Nouveau managed without GSP. According to a Phoronix forum post I can't find right now, with GSP it's something like 10% to 20% percent of the proprietary driver. Michael Larabel will surely publish numbers soon that are a bit more reliable.

fbdab103 3y ago
Ouch. That's a bit more than I am willing to handle.
- samus 3y ago
  Nouveau was already functional for desktop usage though, apart from certain bugs and limitations. If you just can't stand using the proprietary driver and don't need gaming or compute performance, go for it!
  - jakobson14 3y ago
    Should note, you currently _can_ (or will soon) get gaming and compute through vulkan or rusticl. It's just not currently very fast, yet.
petermcneeley 3y ago
If you only get 5% of the power of the device why not simply use the CPUs?
- SXX 3y ago
  Because you want your system installer or LiveUSBs to work without running GPU in VGA mode at 640×480. Also you get this 5% performance when GPU is clocked at 10% power draw.
  - petermcneeley 3y ago
    Yes but you would go pretty far with a integrated intel if you are only getting 5%
SXX 3y ago
It was ~5% because there was no reclocking whatsoever without GSP support. Nouveau was never most performant driver, but developers still been able to achieve something like 50-80% performance on 6xx 7xx series cards before Nvidia started to signed firmware shenanigans. It's not like I defending the driver performance, but considering for decades it was purely reverse engineering effort by skeleton team < 10 people their achievements are outstanding.
- samus 3y ago
  I agree. For years the effort was destined to only ever achieve 10% max of its potential performance. Also, there were architectural changes which probably rendered previous optimizations ineffectual.
jakobson14 3y ago
https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-drivers/open-source-nvidia-linux-nouveau/1422015-rust-written-nak-compiler-merged-for-nouveau-nvk-in-mesa-24-0#post1422080 https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-d... It depended a LOT on the workload. valley? 20% glmark2? 91% vkmark? 11% To some degree this is probably just the vulkan driver and compiler being really, really immature. I expect that the gap will become a LOT closer in the next 6 months, or whenever they get past implementing vulkan 1.3 in the compiler and can put some work into cleanup.