Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Sep 28, 2017 5:29 UTC (Thu) by meyert (subscriber, #32097)
Parent article: Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

So what important functionality can't be covered by the Noveu driver that is covered by the Nvidia driver?

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Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Sep 28, 2017 10:21 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

If you have modern (ie current-gen) hardware, it pretty much doesn't work at all due to a lack of signed firmware.

Older hardware works, but performance is rather lousy due to the trickery required to safely muck with clock/voltage settings that's all done in software.

Even older hardware works reasonably well, albeit not as fast as the proprietary driver.

For OpenCL, the F/OSS stack is behind the curve a bit in features, and is much slower.

For CUDA work, it's proprietary-or-nothing.

Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Sep 28, 2017 13:54 UTC (Thu) by mrshiny (guest, #4266) [Link]

My current-gen nVidia card works now with the nouveau driver, at least for desktop work, since Fedora 26. For gaming though, I wouldn't even bother trying nouveau.

Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Sep 28, 2017 13:28 UTC (Thu) by kschendel (subscriber, #20465) [Link]

Nouveau can't be counted on to work, as in at all. I'm running a completely ordinary nvidia card, a GT120 which is hardly new, and while it's been working with most of the recent 4.x kernels, there were several 3.x kernels which were completely unusable with nouveau (garbled screen).

So the "important functionality" that isn't reliably delivered by nouveau is the ability to use your machine for anything at all that involves the display.