Nick ( enorbit ) ...

How can you be in two places at once when you're not anywhere at all ?

Now the gum's on the other shoe ...

Thanks for the memories

-- kjh

GF Ti 4200? That was along time ago. That was about the time I was looking at switching to the equivalent Radeon, because Nvidia refused to support their OSS driver, even though they could have. You missed the boat, because that is when the Radeon OSS driver just became stable for ATI's current line-up after the disastrous first attempt to a proprietary driver on linux. You probably tried the proprietary driver.

No anchovies?
You've got the wrong man.

Slackware?
Yeah, it's really neat.

I'm ashamed that I didn't notice until a couple of months ago what Regnad Kcin meant.

sigh

I have messed around with building Blender with cudatoolkit support built in.

It did make a difference, but I don't do that much Blender work and have since dropped back to the nouveau driver.

No shame...perhaps you just needed a powerful gasoline or a clean windshield.

...and a shoeshine.




Shoes for Industry, compadre'.

Thanks for that. May first attempt at rendering did not give me the results I was looking for. I rendered an animation, after reading a bit and learning a few things. I rendered an image from a sample I got from the blender web site (slash279). That took 7:14:29:03 (h:m:s:ss) to render (cycles). I am currently rendering the same image with CUDA enabled. It is currently at the 3:44 mark with 4:24 to go. Next will be with nouveau. Then I am done with blender, it really needs a dedicated machine, which I do not have.

Well the Blender render is done. With CUDA enabled the run time was 7:26:21:07, longer than with it not enabled. Now I was doing some of things while this was running, but nothing very CPU or GPU intensive. I've decided to go back the nouveau driver, I may run this again over night. I pretty much decided that while it might be neat to learn, I really don't need Blender. I will stick with the nouveau driver now that Steam works with it.

Yep it was long, long time ago, after I replaced my dearest voodoo 3 with radeon 8500... Card was great, with better image quality and some performance boost over ti4200. Except of that mess of drivers where q3 or ut would cause kernel panic or funky screen artefacts Tried few times afterwards with random radeons but all I can remember is pain and self-loathing .

The Blender render with nouveau took 7:12:16:42.

It's only one test each, non dedicated computer, which would effect those times, so the results are subjective. I was a bit surprised with the CUDA results. I thought it would be faster. As far as I am concerned the nouveau driver wins. Not necessarily because of the times. Mostly because I can go with what comes with Slackware and not mess with the NVIDIA driver. The ONLY reason I went with NVIDIA drivers "was" because of need. That need is gone now.

My final opinion of "To nvidia or not to nvidia..." is unless you need NVIDIA stick with what works.

I found that my screen was failing to resume from suspend although the rest of the laptop responded normally. I suspected the nouveau driver so I finally installed the nvidia driver this morning.

The suspend issue was fixed (presumably by the nvidia driver, but of course this is correlational).

My impressions are that the install process was slightly more involved than a typical slackbuild but easy work overall, and that the system is sharper and quicker with the new driver. Much as predicted by the forum.

I was rooting for nouveau, and pleased to see how far it's come. My previous experiences with it have been pretty unpleasant. But for now, it looks like I'll stick with the nvidia drivers in Slackware as I do in others.

The forum has had good perspectives for me and hopefully for others. @chrisretusn, great seeing actual data comparing speeds.

I have two laptops, both use Slackware64-current, one has Intel the other AMD graphics. My desktops all have NVIDIA cards.

Agree that nouveau has come a long way. I used the nouveau driver for a very long time until I setup Steam. Then when with the NVIDIA driver. I notice a distinct difference on boot up with the boot up sequence between the NVIDIA and the nouveau driver. The nouveau driver is brighter and sharper that with the NVIDIA driver. I like the nouveau driver. Like I said earlier it's really based on needs and what works.

At long, long, time ago in a land far away... <grin> I tried the SlackBuilds for NVIDIA, it was not a good experience, so rather than mess with getting them to work, I went with the blob. I can't remember the circumstance on why I went to NVIDIA over nouveau though. At some point I did go back to the nouveau driver until I installed Steam. Now that the nouveau driver, xorg-server combination provides what Steam wants, I am back to nouveau.

2 members found this post helpful.

OK I suppose it's time for a different shootout with actual number scores and with some attention to acceleration, especially 3D acceleration, but also simple desktop performance. So first, the test beds which is all on my boxen with an i5 Quad Core 3550, 8GB Ram, and an nVidia GTX 1070 Ti. I tried re-installing nouveau for a couple of hours to use the exact same OpSys but ran into difficulties with the kernel modules on my custom 4.15.0 kernel so I ran the nouveau test on the latest as of today SlackLive from a DVD and SlackLive on hdd install from three months ago that is still a completely default install other than Conky and the proprietary nvidia driver, so other than the drivers comparable systems on identical hardware.

NOTE: It may be important that I am comparing a stock 14.2+ system, one with nouveau built-in and one with nouveau blacklisted and nvidia installed in that there may well be steps some here more familiar take with nouveau that substantially improves it's performance on basic desktop or accelerated or 3D apps.

My SlackLive DVD is the full 3.1GB version so it boots to the KDM desktop chooser. It took 24 seconds to get from login to desktop. So the first difference is that the hdd install took 5 seconds to do the same job. I can't say how much of LiveSlack is loaded to ram vs/ read from disk but everything felt slower and "clunkier" with nouveau, but still basically usable. I don't know of a good basic desktop function benchmark so all I have is this anecdotal experience that I could live with nouveau had I not experienced nvidia with one probably huge caveat - ON THIS HARDWARE.

Now for the crusher. I tried to run the latest Unigine Heaven benchmark and frankly I was a bit surprised and impressed that nouveau actually loaded the welcome/setup screen. I also tried just for grins to use the extreme settings I've tested out many times with the nvidia driver where literally EVERYTHING is maxed out - tesselation, vSync, antialiasing, sound, Ultra base setting... the works.

At first I was again impressed that the menu appeared at the top with nouveau but the screen remained black throughout (with the exception of the blue radio buttons just mentioned) and then I noticed the little balloon in the upper right reporting "FPS = 1" and that there was no mouse cursor. Eventually the cursor did show up but whenever I clicked a menuitem there was a delay of over 10 seconds before it would register. It took a long while to close the application but it did finally close and I reset to "Basic" which is tesselation disabled, no antialiasing, no vSync no sound, and in a window half the size of system full screen. The only difference was the delay was around 2 seconds but the screen remained black and the little FPS bubble still never advanced beyond "1" but for a brief moment in which I saw "2".

Now for the nividia driver and hdd system. Everything was instantaneous on the desktop and as I said it only took 5 seconds to load initially as opposed to 24. I never set Heaven down to "Basic" but ran it wide open, everything maxed as far as it can possibly go

Note: The nvidia test results are better on my main system which is substantially tweaked for performance where the two test beds were essentially stock.

SO I conclude that while nouveau does a decent enough job at basic 2D desktop, BY COMPARIOSON it is woefully inadequate for serious 3D and accelerated functions with high performance hardware.

IMPORTANT! That said, I must add that I mean no disrespect to the nouveau team in fact quite the opposite. They are fighting an uphill battle on a constantly moving target which may explain why people here using aged and/or "lowball" technology are experiencing less of the dramatic differences I have encountered. Hopefully nvidia will take note of AMD/ATi's success in OpenSource to the point of inclusion of extremely good kernel drivers now built-in the linux kernel and finally give nouveau "a reacharound" to improve it's standing with FOSS.

Also it is possible that running from a DVD contributed to these results but other apps open and run as fast or faster than my hdd isntall due to running from ram. I just don't know how much of SlackLive runs from Ram vs/ Disk. However i would be soundly shocked if that even in worst case even allowed Basic Heaven to run at all let alone at Ultra.

2 members found this post helpful.

When I run Unigine Heaven Benchmark 4.0 with the nouveau driver, the benchmark results are:

Now I'm curious. I'll install the nvidia drivers and see what the delta turns out to be.