[Nouveau] Nouveau support for GeForce GT 730 or GTX 750 Ti?

[Ilia Mirkin]

On Sun, Jan 3, 2016 at 1:04 PM, Csányi Pál <csanyipal at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm currently use GeForce 7600 GT with nouveau driver.
> This is a very old graphic card without OpenGL support.

Well, I wouldn't say *without* but... crappy :) The nv30 driver leaves
a lot to be desired, and it doesn't handle some fairly common cases in
more recent software.

>
> I want to use nouveau driver in the future too.
>
> So I'm in doubt in that that whether to buy
> GeForce GT730
> or
> GTX 750 Ti card?
>
> I don't want to run super 3D game applications but only:
> games-adventure/pioneer <http://pioneerspacesim.net/> sometimes
> and
> SweetHome3D more often
> or
> GoogleSketchUp ( by using PlayOnLinux ); although this last ( GSkUP )
> has never been usable at all ( garbage on screen).
>
> So, does nouveau support these cards?
>
> Should I choose GTX 750 Ti or GT 730 or neither of them?
>
> Is that true that GTX 750 Ti is Maxwell and may work with
> xf86-video-nouveau v1.0.11, but the next v1.0.12 removed the GM10x
> support?

In effect nothing was removed, only fixed. Anything you read to the
contrary is incorrect. GM10x is driven just fine by
xf86-video-modesetting, much better than it ever was by
xf86-video-nouveau (for example you get functioning DRI2 support,
ability to create core contexts, etc). However GLAMOR triggers some
bug in mesa which causes wild misrendering all over. I have a shotgun
fix to this, but it's not upstreamable. See
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93373 for more
information. AFAIK this is not maxwell-specific, but there is
currently not (nor has there ever been) EXA support in
xf86-video-nouveau for it, which means only Maxwell users are hitting
it. I have a patch for EXA support for Maxwell which is about 90% done
but I haven't had the {time,will,caring} to complete it. I also have
no Maxwell GPU, which makes testing a lot more painful.

>
> So should I buy instead the GT 730 card?

I would very much recommend a GT 730 over a GTX 750 Ti in terms of
nouveau support, although they are not comparable in price or
performance (GT 730 will be cheaper and slower). But on the bright
side you should be able to reclock a GT 730, so perhaps with nouveau
it really will be faster.

Among other things, Maxwell doesn't support tessellation, and you can
be sure that as new features become supported, maxwell support will
come second. (Again, not for any real reason other than that I don't
have one.) You can expect this to change once nouveau gains the
ability to accelerate on GM20x GPUs, but who knows when this will
happen.

Oh, one last thought, I know NVIDIA loves to rebrand marketing
names... make sure you don't get a GT 730 that's really a Fermi -- if
it says 48 or 96 cores, it's probably a Fermi. If it says 192 or 384
cores then it will almost certainly be a Kepler (which is what you
want).

For the best open-source support, I recommend sticking with an
on-board Intel GPU, or if that's insufficient (esp recent stuff has
been getting pretty speedy), getting something from AMD.

Cheers,

  -ilia