Looks like Mesa has hit OpenGL 4.5 for the open source Nvidia 'nvc0' driver

Nice to see more improvements in Mesa all around. My laptop became useless after fglrx was deprecated, but I put Xubuntu 16.10 on last night. Looks like it's running r600 because I have OpenGL 4.1 support on it now. Before, I had 3.x support only, essentially turning my laptop into a hunk of trash.

So the code is there to display things correctly, but the card GPU speed can't be turned up due to "clocking support" being encrypted/closed somehow in order to fully utilize NVIDIA cards so we could actually use the open source driver for gaming?

Correct. Nvidia locked all the power management stuff down (at least) in firmware, which requires a lot of the functionality to be signed by Nvidia to work. That's why I would strongly suggest anyone who believes in free software and wants to support it to avoid modern Nvidia graphics cards.

AMD is also locked in its own way AFAIK

It uses proprietary microcode, but is only there for DRM features used exclusively by Windows. The components that are locked should never be used anyway. In other words, it's not locked at all.

If AMD released a free software microcode option, that would be perfect since we could plainly see it's not trying to do anything evil. eg. it would prevent AMD coming out with a microcode you could buy to get an increase in Mhz as Intel have done in the past with their CPUs. As it stands today, the proprietary microcode is the reason a lot of distributions don't support modern GPUs. eg. Trisquel, GuixSD, etc. But it's a very minor problem (for AMD cards) all things considered. You could make the same claim about Intel graphics as well.

Closed hardware is fine as long as the specifications regarding how to use it are available.


Last edited by boltronics on 20 October 2016 at 5:19 am UTC

Interestingly, with latest kernel releases including 4.4.24 my nvidia cards (optimus and 760) stopped freezing with the nvc0 driver... seems as if they finally fixed what ever caused the freezes, so I'm finally able to use the open source drivers (and within that, I can finally test wayland :-)).

I'm very happy about that, since long-term I'd like to go for the nvc0 driver for most of my computers (except for the one running SteamOS, I still don't trust the driver for games).


Last edited by STiAT on 20 October 2016 at 11:31 am UTC

I'm very happy about that, since long-term I'd like to go for the nvc0 driver for most of my computers (except for the one running SteamOS, I still don't trust the driver for games).

If your goal is to go open source, I'd strongly advise you to buy an AMD card for several reasons:

1. AMD are more open source-friendly than NVIDIA
2. So AMD has a nice advance in how the open source communities work (it can take ages to push a patch to the Linux kernel if you're doing it wrong)
3. I've been using the r600 drivers for quite some time and was able to play most of the games (like Cities: Skyline, but not Alien: Isolation)
4. I've bought an RX 480 and now I can play Alien: Isolation ;)
5. Since AMD is more open-source friendly, we'll see much more improvements and optimizations on their open source drivers
6. RADV (which also proves point 5. ;))


Last edited by Creak on 20 October 2016 at 2:27 pm UTC

Well, regarding overcloking Kepler is really OK, it just needs proper testing done so they can turn it on by default and dynamically. Same with Fermi. Maxwell and Pascal is issue here, and yes, to support good vendor who delivers open source drivers (yes, closed firmware but that's discussed above) it is worth to pick AMD, it start to work properly again on Linux.

So despite all shortcomings this is awesome news. I am certainly look forward to use Nouveau with my GTX 760.

Now work can start on optimizations to get it working even faster than binary drivers.