It seems there's a performance bug in recent NVIDIA drivers that has been causing a loss of performance across likely all GPUs. Not only that, but it seems to end up using more VRAM than previous drivers too.
User HeavyHDx started a thread on the official NVIDIA forum, to describe quite a big drop in performance since the 375 driver series. So all driver updates since then would have been affected by this.
NVIDIA themselves have now commented to confirm the issue. Here's what the NVIDIA rep said about it:
This likely matches a similar performance drop observed on another Feral game, Total War: WARHAMMER.
We've been tracking it internally as bug 1963500. There was a change, introduced in our r378 branch, to the logic of allocation of certain textures, but it apparently exposed a bug in our memory manager.
Our next release branch, r390, will carry a workaround, and we're still working on finding and fixing the root cause.
So it seems to affect at least Deus Ex Mankind Divided, Total War: WARHAMMER, Company of Hereos 2 and most likely a number of other titles too.
The same NVIDIA rep also said they aim to have the 390 driver series out before the end of the year, let's hope that doesn't come with its own problems! Great to know they are aware of it and that the next driver series will have a workaround to improve it, getting Linux game performance back on track is pretty important.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Somehow i have a feeling that Pascal GPUs are not affected by this.. or maybe because i have 8GB of Vram so i wont notice the drop.
Last edited by emptythevoid on 30 November 2017 at 2:33 pm UTC
Quoting: Xpanderi still havent noticed any difference in performance with drivers 375.x to 387.34.
It is apparently a bug that causes higher VRAM usage. You probably have plenty of that for most games so that it won't affect performance much.
Quoting: emptythevoidThis is interesting because I've suspected a <recent> loss of FPS in Borderlands 2, a game I play regularly. I'll have to check what nvidia driver I'm using at the moment on my 970.I wish we had a field and an API here on GoL to autofill the current videodriver version or a commit/version of Mesa build (or even most of the fields). These days it's as crucial as the hardware configuration. It could be as simple as a cronjob/systemd timer that runs a script once a day. The script collects that info and updates it on the site using a private API token for the user. Also would be great to have a BB-code (and a corresponding button to insert it) like [mygpu] or [myhw] that inserts all the relevant data into your comment as it is at the moment of posting, so it doesn't autoupdate later.
The use case is simple, a new game/port comes out and many people post things like "it runs great for me!" or "stutters like a dying horse" and so on. Would be handy to put that tag so that others know on what exact configuration it happens without the need to click "View PC info" each time which can also be updated later so it becomes irrelevant.
What do you think, Liam?
Quoting: emptythevoidThis is interesting because I've suspected a <recent> loss of FPS in Borderlands 2, a game I play regularly. I'll have to check what nvidia driver I'm using at the moment on my 970.I contacted Aspyr about my Borderlands 2, and TPS performance drop. I have experienced it on the stable 384.98, and the 387.34 drivers. They could not reproduce my problem. hopefully this gets fixed with the newer Nvidia drivers.
lucifertdark Nov 30, 2017
Quoting: lucifertdarkI would much prefer to have them say "we found a bug & fixed it" rather than "we found a bug & we'll fix it some time in the next month or so", fix it then tell us it about it.I'm sure that Nvidia doing this makes it easier on Feral since they are receiving support tickets for their games. It also makes me feel less crazy about my performance issues. When some support can't reproduce them.
Quoting: lucifertdarkI would much prefer to have them say "we found a bug & fixed it" rather than "we found a bug & we'll fix it some time in the next month or so", fix it then tell us it about it.How exactly would it be better if they kept us in the dark? On the contrary, I'd much prefer it if they had a public bug tracker.
Patreon
PayPal
See more from me