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.
Quoting: tuubiNot 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.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.
Quoting: oldgarolmaooo...good time to move away from NVIDIA!Well, no. Let's not pretend Mesa is perfect. All software has bugs and regressions.
Quoting: liamdaweQuoting: oldgarolmaooo...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
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.
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.
Quoting: EhvisThey'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.
Quoting: liamdaweQuoting: oldgarolmaooo...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.
TheRiddick Nov 30, 2017
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!
Quoting: wleoncioSuch 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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