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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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NVIDIA R550 Linux Driver's Open Kernel Modules Performing Well On GeForce GPUs (www.phoronix.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago (3 children)

The autotldr-bot only summarized the first page, so here are some more quotes. Basically, the performance was almost identical, with two notable exceptions.

Across a variety of demanding GPU benchmarks the NVIDIA R550 open kernel driver continued to perform on-par with the proprietary driver for these GeForce RTX 40 graphics cards.

While running Blender 4.0 the proprietary kernel driver seemed to yield slightly better performance. It was just fractions of a second but was rather consistently showing the proprietary driver having that slight advantage here, unlike in other workloads.

There was the small advantage too that during periods of brief downtime using the open kernel driver appeared to deliver slightly lower GPU power consumption than the proprietary driver.

Does anyone have an idea what's the point with the proprietary driver now? Does it have any features missing in the open driver?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You have to use the proprietary driver with GTX 1000 series cards and older to get good performance. 900 and 1000 series cards are cucked with no re-clocking on nouveau because they require signed firmware.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You're right, the new open source driver does not support the 1000 series and older, only Turing (2000 series) and above.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

And 16 series, but that is also Turing.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

Does it have any features missing in the open driver?

You can see the differences in the official README here: https://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/550.54.14/README/kernel_open.html

The main difference for me is the inability to preserve video memory during suspend and hibernate. Without it, sleep and hibernate will cause all sorts of weird graphical glitches upon resume.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Is the open driver more stable in Wayland now? 535, I couldn't use Wayland at all. 545, the open driver was still giving me all kinds of problems, but proprietary driver was flawless. Just upgraded and nothing broke, so I guess I'll try flipping back to open again and giving it a try, but the point of the proprietary driver has been stability, at least for some of us. [Arch/Wayland/hyprland/rtx3060]