This is about Nouveau, the reverse engineered drivers, not Nvidia’s official open source drivers… Pretty confusing from just the title.
So there is hope for my old GTX 1070? I don’t want to use the proprietary driver on my old (secondary) computer.
Nope, 900 and 1000 series have little hope of being properly supported. They require signed firmware which seems to be problem and are not new enough for the “open-source” solution from Nvidia for new cards.
But this is about the community Nouveau, not the Open Source driver from Nvidia. Nouveau works with the older cards too, but it is known to be not that performant and has some stability issues. I never used it, so this is not my personal experience at all, since I switched to AMD.
I am aware. Nouveau works okish with cards from the 800 series and older. It does only barely work with 900 and 1000 series cards, because of the firmware signing issue. You can check their page for compatibility information. And the new “open-source” driver only supports the RTX cards.
I really don’t know what you mean by the firmware signing issue. Searched the web and didn’t find a conclusive answer. There is this table: https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/FeatureMatrix.html . What issues are to be expected using Nouveau on the 1070? Also is this an outdated issue maybe? Because the driver got some work over the years since the launch of the card too.
So what does firmware signing issue mean with the community Open Source drive? Can you point me to a source so I can read about it? I’m curious, because I think about reviving my old machine without using proprietary drivers.
What do you mean? I’m running Linux on a 1070 with minimal issues
I’m sick of the proprietary driver. Especially if using Flatpak and even worse, if you have multiple Kernels installed, especially updating Kernels often on Archlinux. In Flatpak multiple driver versions need to be downloaded (each above 300 MB) and they are always fully downloaded, not partially. With an internet speed that was not too fast it took a lot of time just for Nvidia. And then each Kernel module had to be compiled and build with Kernel updates, which took time with each Kernel update.
Otherwise, running the gpu worked pretty good, that is not my issue with it. There were here and there stuff that was annoying, in example Wayland was not good supported back then.
Gonna hold my breath, pls hurry
FYI this is the nouveau driver no one uses. There is absolutely no reason to use an nvidia card and this driver.
My older previous computer has a GTX 1070 and I don’t use it because I avoid the proprietary driver. If the nouveau driver becomes good, I can use my older secondary computer for something else. Hell, it can even game, but that wouldn’t be my main usage anyway.
So yes, there are people caring about nouveau driver.
I really feel bad for the nouveau developers, it seems like such a thankless job.
If you have an Nvidia card then you are going use it. That is a reason.
Not exactly. There are two alternatives, depending on which card you have: a) the proprietary driver, b) the new Open Source driver that supports RTX 20xx series and upwards.
Nouveau seems to work pretty well on Debian 13 for me, at least for standard web browser / streaming / video playback with 2160p HDR tonemapping. Back when I was using Debian 12 Nouveau would lag badly during 2160p playback so I was force to use the Nvidia driver binary at the time. But so far it’s been alright, granted I’ve not tested any gaming and perhaps that’s where Nouveau won’t do as well.
Maybe best to avoid NVDA if using Linux, entirely.
My next build is going to be AMD GPU and CPU with nixOS. I heard GPU support for Linux is better with AMD cards, but honestly haven’t delved into it whether it holds any truth or not.
I also switched to AMD+AMD. The GPU support being better on AMD comes from the Open Source driver that is integrated into Linux. But there are caveats. In example if you need OpenCL or other features, it can be problematic with AMD. Plus, if you have a Nvidia card 20xx series or newer, then you can use the new Open Source driver too. And Nvidia support for Wayland and other stuff got better nowadays (just reading about it, no personal experience with current, my last Nvidia card is 1070).
While I prefer AMD gpu now, the “better support” is not really black and white.
It’s generally easier because the drivers are built in. Nvidia is perfectly usable, but it’s more susceptible to breaking during kernel updates. It’s not as bad as everyone makes it sound though. That said, AMD is usually the way to go on Linux unless your use case requires Nvidia.
The use case is precision CAD and DNN development.
cuDNN+CUDA+TensorCores have the best TOPS/$/kWh performance (for now). Plus, I need ECC VRAM for professional CAD calculations.
There’s plenty of reasons to use an NVIDIA stack.
It’s just weird when people say there’s no reason to use their products.
I use it because I need HDMI :/
Can you explain what you mean by that? You can’t use HDMI with AMD?
What does that have to do with needing NVIDIA?
The newer versions of HDMI aren’t supported on AMD cards due to licencing issues.
Something about AMD not being able to license the HDMI protocol in a way that allows open source code.
The main Nvidia driver that people use is proprietary, so it doesn’t have that problem
Obviously AMD and Intel don’t include HDMI on their cards.
/s
“perfectly usable” as in you have to install a third party translation layer to make hardware video decoding work on firefox
