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.
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Interesting is that Feral requires 384 drivers because 387 has performance issues for F1 2017. Is that the same problem, or is that a different one specifically for Vulkan?
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i still havent noticed any difference in performance with drivers 375.x to 387.34. Havent tested Deus Ex though, but Total War Warhammer wasnt affected for me. I specially installed the old drivers to test out if drivers are issue why Rust is performing poorly compared to the performance in late Summer. Its pretty painfull to go back to those old drivers on Arch Linux though, have to downgrade kernel and whatnot :)
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.
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.
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This 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.
Last edited by emptythevoid on 30 November 2017 at 2:33 pm UTC
Last edited by emptythevoid on 30 November 2017 at 2:33 pm UTC
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i 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.
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This 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?
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This 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.
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lucifertdark Nov 30, 2017
I 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.
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I 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.
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I 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.
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Not only that, but I don't think people realize just how much work is involved in putting out a new release. You can't just click compile it and send it out, it has to go through tons of testing. We're talking a GPU driver here for tons years of generations of chips.I 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.
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lmaooo...good time to move away from NVIDIA!Well, no. Let's not pretend Mesa is perfect. All software has bugs and regressions.
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lmaooo...good time to move away from NVIDIA!Well, no. Let's not pretend Mesa is perfect. All software has bugs and regressions.
The only time I have experienced regressions is when using mesa git, now the kernel driver is a different story. There are still a few games that have issues (Warden: Melody of the Undergrowth) and some with performance problems (War Thunder performs poorly in certain situations). I recall kernel 4.10 and recently 4.14 has given some performance regressions. All is fine thus far on kernel 4.15RC1 from my testing so far.
Last edited by m0nt3 on 30 November 2017 at 8:18 pm UTC
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I 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.
They're not saying they'll fix it in next release. They stated it would contain a workaround because they have not yet identified the cause.
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They're not saying they'll fix it in next release. They stated it would contain a workaround because they have not yet identified the cause.
I'm reading this as they will undo the change that showed the problematic behaviour and will fix the bug and redo the change then later.
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lmaooo...good time to move away from NVIDIA!Well, no. Let's not pretend Mesa is perfect. All software has bugs and regressions.
Agreed.
Until Amd Mesa supports compat profiles , Nvidia will be the winner.
Not everybody has to deal with various workarounds to run some games.
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TheRiddick Nov 30, 2017
The testers should really be comparing performance metrics with many of the AAA and popular titles across at least several previous generations of drivers. So I really don't know what sort of testing their doing, do they play games and run benchmarks even?
Meanwhile AMD still struggles getting good fps in many of these games, Deus Ex being one of the big offenders, makes the VEGA cards look REAL bad!
Meanwhile AMD still struggles getting good fps in many of these games, Deus Ex being one of the big offenders, makes the VEGA cards look REAL bad!
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Such good news! I did notice my performance in Deus Ex:MD dropping from 30-60 fps to 5-15 fps after a driver update about a month ago, but I was too lazy to downgrade or to report the bug.
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Such good news! I did notice my performance in Deus Ex:MD dropping from 30-60 fps to 5-15 fps after a driver update about a month ago, but I was too lazy to downgrade or to report the bug.
Wow , this sounds massive. I think you should at least comment on there , just get over your laziness this time :D
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