wimNov 16, 2023

State of the Nvidia open source driver in late 2023?

https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/7686599

State of the Nvidia open source driver in late 2023? - SDF Chatter

Hi all, I’m in the market for a new big desktop replacement gaming laptop, and looking at the market there are almost exclusively Nvidia powered. I was wondering about the state of their new open-source driver. Can I run a plain vanilla kernel with only open source / upstream packages and drivers and expect to get a good experience? How is battery life, performance? Does DRI Prime and Vulkan based GPU selection “just work”? The only alternative new for my market is a device with an Intel Arc A730M, which I currently think is going to be the one I end up buying.

Show threadAniki 🌱🌿Nov 16, 2023

If you want to do anything serious with 3D in linux you need to use an AMD chipset. Intel sucks. Nvidia sucks.

It’s not complicated – Intel only cares about business so their mesa implementation in Linux is a tragedy. Nvidia only cares about CUDA so their drivers are closed sourced a buggy as fuck.

Show threadwimNov 16, 2023

What makes you say Intel sucks? The A730M should be somewhere between an RTX 3060 and 3070 but with 12GB of VRAM. From my experience with Intel iGPUs, the software experience is very nice, so I just expect the same thing but with faster performance.

I’ve tried an A730M laptop last year when they were new, and the drivers worked fine, everything was working out of the box. The only issue was that performance was not stable and power usage was high, but I’m assuming performance will only have improved with 12 months of driver engineering from Intel.

Show threadAniki 🌱🌿

These cards have been out for years…

tomshardware.com/…/intels-new-gpu-drivers-boost-p…

If you’re re-writing drivers and getting a 50% boost in performance, your implementation is fucking tragic.

www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-23.0.2-Released

This mesa release had a draw bug for intel GPUs that was over 2 years old.

It’s BAD bad in Intel land. I want them to be good, but they just are not.

Intel's New GPU Drivers Boost Performance Up To 750% in DX11, 53% in DX12

Massive gains are incoming.

Tom's Hardware
Nov 16, 2023 at 11:17amWeb
Show threadworldofgeeseNov 16, 2023
The Intel discrete cards are fantastic value for money. There’s plenty of folks on the internet who can attest to this. Intel’s support story in general (so not just graphics cards) on Linux has been nothing less than sterling. If you’re using any Linux kernel you can expect Intel stuff to just work. It’s been this way for at least a decade.
Show threadAniki 🌱🌿Nov 16, 2023

This is just wrong. Intel GPU support in MESA has been serviceable at best.

It’s still getting Arc optimizations… today.

www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-23.3-rc4-Released

  • mesh shader support by default for Intel ANV

LOL

Mesa 23.3-rc4 Released With More Fixes

Show threadLeFantomeNov 16, 2023

When is the last time you tried Intel hardware and with what software? I ask because your links do not really tell the same story as your post.

The first link says that Mesa got “more Intel optimizations”. That sounds like a good thing. It basically says the same thing about AMD and NVIDIA. The only GPU “crash” that was addressed was for AMD which is widely regarded as the best option for Linux. I would not read that article and come away with any concerns about Intel.

The second link says that kernel 6.2 added “full Intel support”. We are now in kernel 6.7. I use a rolling release and how a much newer kernel than 6.2. A brief Google leads me to believe that 6.5 ships with both Ubuntu 23.10 and Fedora 39.

I have not used these cards myself so I do it know but others have said the experience was decent now. The OP does not seem that demanding. If it ok now and actively improving, he may be quite happy. It sounds better than nouveau for sure. Is it really as bad as you say?

Show threadAniki 🌱🌿Nov 16, 2023
I have two Intel GPU powered machines.