this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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AMD. Not even a question, really. AMD has by far the best drivers. Intel is in a reasonable second place in that they at least have open source drivers and those drivers work well, but due to their newness in the discrete GPU space I still occasionally see issues on my A770. It is solidly usable for the most part though. NVIDIA? Dead freakin last. Their proprietary driver is a mess to install and only recently is able to render anything without screen tearing and unplayable flicker. The situation is improving though thanks to NVK, an awesome third-party, reverse engineered, open source driver that is seeing rapid improvement. I can play Overwatch at 165fps on my RTX3070 laptop finally, but only at lowest settings and 50% resolution scaling (it can do the same at ultra on Windows at 100%). I am very confident we'll see NVK improve performance though.
i agree i dont like how on nvidia proprietary drivers its settings on wayland does not show everything and doesn't amd make closed source drivers to ik there is 2 drivers for linux the amdpro and the open source amd driver Also your the dev of openrgb? Best software ever
On AMD there is a pro driver that I think is proprietary but nobody uses it for desktop usage or gaming. You might use it if you were doing GPU compute servers on professional cards, but the open source radv driver has the best gaming performance for AMD.
On NVIDIA there is the proprietary driver that consists of out-of-tree module (both open and closed source variants depending on what GPU generation) and the proprietary userspace OpenGL/Vulkan/CUDA driver. Completely separately you have the open source Nouveau kernel and OpenGL driver and NVK Vulkan driver. The proprietary one has better performance in most cases but is broken for Overwatch 2 while NVK runs OW2 smoothly at low settings for me, and that's my most played game.
And yeah, I am the creator of OpenRGB. Thanks!
oh okay but yes its proprietary i think that is for commercial use
Yep but they want to start open sourcing their drivers but am pretty sure not everything i also heard Nouveau is weaker then the Proprietary nvidia drivers
Yw, even your openrgb app works better then the asus one i always run into problems on that (Yeah i always turn off the rgb on my ram stick)
The key thing to note about NVIDIA "open sourcing their driver" is that they only open sourced the kernel portion. I see no intention of opening the userspace portion. GPU drivers have multiple parts. The kernel driver is the low level interface that passes data to and from the hardware while the userspace is what actually handles converting OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenCL, CUDA, etc. calls into GPU commands and that part is where most of the performance impact happens. NVIDIA is not open sourcing the userspace.
That's why NVK/Nouveau are so important, because it is a fully open stack. It is also part of the Mesa project which encompasses all the open GPU drivers on Linux which makes it more integrated with the Linux graphics stack.
oh okay so smth like open core
Installed Linux recently... I guess thay explains why the game I tested out played like crap? Fps held until I moved the camera (or anything else was happening) amd dropped to like 3
Did you wait at all? Slow performance when you first open a game is sort of normal because of shader compilation. It's a side effect of the translation layer used to run Direct3D games on Vulkan. Once shaders are all compiled the slowdown should go away.
i think i wait about a minute or so
To add to this, you can also boot apex in the dx12 mode on Linux (this will switch it from DXVK to VKD3D).
The benefit of this is that the game will generate most shaders at the title screen ahead of time. This greatly improves first play experience at the cost of having to wait a little bit the first time you open the game.
There is a launch command for it? I might try
On Steam, I use
-novid -anticheat_settings=SettingsDX12.jsonty
I waited a bit but didn't seem to improve. I intent to try again and play with it. I just didn't have time or mindspace for it, just wanted to play the game for a bit si booted to Windows.
true on apex idk why these types of games lag when i pulled out my shield it crashed the game Also beamng lags to hovering over 6-9 fps and somtimes it will not run at all the linux version even worse it does not run at all
What are you running it on? I haven't touched Apex in a while but last time I tried on Linux it was playable (this was probably on my Intel Arc A770). I've played BeamNG on my Steam Deck (AMD GPU) and it runs decently too.
I am using a gtx 1650 gpu with a i3 12100f cpu (beamng tested on regular fedora and apex on both fedora and cachyos) beamng and apex runs better on windows
Yeah, NVIDIA will do that to you. That still sounds too low though, are you using the NVIDIA proprietary drivers? I'm not sure Fedora ships NVK yet as it is rather new, I think became mostly usable around Mesa 24.0 earlier this year.
am using their proprietary drivers but now i distrohopped to cachyos due to their optimized kernel i also wanted to use nobara to but yeah secure boot (i think its better to keep it on) and i want the aur to install packages that arent in arch its useful
For what it's worth, s22 in apex seems to have reintroduced an issue with server side connectivity problems that can manifest as acute hitching when close to a large number of other players. You should be able to spot the network icon under these scenarios but it's not always presented in time.
If you're talking about overall input responsiveness, I've found that VRR on Fedora + GNOME + Wayland has made a world of difference
Doesn't kde also support vrr
It does and has done for quite a while now on Wayland. GNOME Presently has experimental support for it but it works well enough in my testing.
oh alr
Quick reminder that nvidia has released opensource kernel level drivers recently that are comparable in performance to the proprietqry drivers
While that might be technically true, the kernel module is only a tiny fraction of the driver stack.
Also, I'm not interested in rewarding a company that spent decades making life difficult for open source users and developers, when there are competitors who have done far better (and have more experience) in this space.
The kernel driver is a rather small piece of the overall puzzle though, itps just the pipe that GPU commands are passed through. The bulk of the GPU driver code (and the majority of its impact on performance) is in the userspace components like the shader compiler and the OpenGL/Vulkan libraries. These are closed source.
The exception to this rule is that the kernel driver is responsible for power management and controls the GPU clocks, but as part of opening up the kernel driver NVIDIA made reclocking available for the fully open driver (nouveau/nvk) to use as well which means the performance differences between the two driver stacks are now down to optimizations.
they are open core not fully open source
"Not every GPU is compatible with the open-source GPU kernel modules.
For cutting-edge platforms such as NVIDIA Grace Hopper or NVIDIA Blackwell, you must use the open-source GPU kernel modules. The proprietary drivers are unsupported on these platforms." - developer.nvidia.com
Only 9 years after AMD, and 13 years after Linus said "fuck you Nvidia" during a talk for being such a difficult company to work with.