It is a widely known and accepted fact that the proprietary Nvidia drivers offer the best gaming performance in the Linux world. But can you live without them on Nvidia hardware?
I've messed with the open source Nouveau driver once in a while but recently I decided I'd like to properly test how well Nouveau would be able to handle my day-to-day computer activities.
For the next two weeks I will be using Nouveau exclusively on my desktop to do any and all gaming. I have upgraded my kernel to 3.16 and gotten Nouveau and Mesa from the Oibaf PPA so I have access to some levels of GPU reclocking. It's a bit experimental (and manual) but it should allow me to push games a bit harder than before.
I'll try to play all kinds of games and test most of my Steam library during this 2 week period and record some gameplay material to show you how well various games run on Nouveau. I will also use Nouveau during both of my Friday livestreams.
Just to give you an idea what kind of a computer I'm going to be using, here are the specs of my rig:
- Intel i5-2500k at 3.3GHZ
- GTX 760 with 2GB of VRAM
- 8GB of RAM
My expectations are not extremely high but my initial testing has shown that it won't be completely horrible.
What kind of stuff would you like to see me test during these two weeks? Make sure to let me know in the comments! Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
I've messed with the open source Nouveau driver once in a while but recently I decided I'd like to properly test how well Nouveau would be able to handle my day-to-day computer activities.
For the next two weeks I will be using Nouveau exclusively on my desktop to do any and all gaming. I have upgraded my kernel to 3.16 and gotten Nouveau and Mesa from the Oibaf PPA so I have access to some levels of GPU reclocking. It's a bit experimental (and manual) but it should allow me to push games a bit harder than before.
I'll try to play all kinds of games and test most of my Steam library during this 2 week period and record some gameplay material to show you how well various games run on Nouveau. I will also use Nouveau during both of my Friday livestreams.
Just to give you an idea what kind of a computer I'm going to be using, here are the specs of my rig:
- Intel i5-2500k at 3.3GHZ
- GTX 760 with 2GB of VRAM
- 8GB of RAM
My expectations are not extremely high but my initial testing has shown that it won't be completely horrible.
What kind of stuff would you like to see me test during these two weeks? Make sure to let me know in the comments! Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Well, this gave me the idea to try out the OS drivers for AMD for the first time. Last night I added the PPA for the latest version of the open source driver and also updated my kernel to 3.19. I've to say the performance on my 290x was surprising. Although the max fps seem to have dropped, the minimum have increased and the games seem to be running more consistently now. Hand of Fate sticks to about 45fps, while before it was all over the place. Torchlight II seems to perform about the same as before. Borderlands II actually increased in performance, but sadly, probably due to lack of official support of AMD hardware by the port, it's still too choppy to play properly. I'll check out Dead Island later tonight and get back with an update.
1) Please tell us about Dead Island. Can't get it to work on my HD6950 since the last update (that works for everyone but me it seems)
2) Borderlands 2 and TPS both run at no less than 45FPS on my outdated HD6950 (2GB version) with Mesa and the open source drivers. May be due to Arch and some other components?
What Mesa version do you use? Your 290x is _FAR_ stronger than my graphicscard, but I can play both games just fine (1920x1200 [yes, more than full-hd] resolution and most things maxed out)
3) Yes, the open source drivers run perfectly on AMD. For me they run _MUCH_ better than the proprietary ones. I get less stutter, more fps and as a bonus no problems during x-server-updates with my rolling release distro :D
Sadly I couldn't play it. The game starts, the intro works but when I hit continue it loads and then as it seems just when it's about to start - crashes. When I ran Steam through terminal this is the error I got:
LLOG: len=0; max=2560000Segmentation fault (core dumped)
The driver I use is: OpenGL version string: 3.0 Mesa 10.6.0-devel and I'm using Ubuntu 14.10 with kernel 3.19. I'm open for advice :).
It seems its not a problem particular to me, though - I see other people posting it on the Steam forums. Overall, I get the impression that 290(x) support is bad both for the proprietary and the open source driver.
Anyway I'll try Witcher 2 to wrap up the heavy AAA games I have for Linux. Might try some game in PlayOnLinux in the following days, too.
UPDATE: Age of Wonders III doesn't even start and Witcher II runs pretty bad with about 30fps and stutter at medium settings.
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You should try some games made with Valve Source Engine, they run well on old graphic cards, so with a recent one even with Nouveau it should work well.
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ElectricPrism Mar 18, 2015
Answer to Article: Nope. The 75% performance loss of using Nouveau was inadequite to run DOTA on my GTX 460 SE. Now that I got a GTX 970 last month I might be able to get away with it, but if I wanted to use a fully open driver I would buy a AMD Kaveri APU as the AMD HSA stack is part of Kernel 4.0
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