[Nouveau] State of Video Decoding for Maxwell cards

[Christoph Böhmwalder]

Hi Everyone,

I have a Maxwell Card (GTX 970/NV 110) and would very much like to use
nouveau to drive it.  The problem is that the performance -- especially
when decoding high-resolution video -- seems to be relatively poor
compared to the proprietary Nvidia driver.  I'm interested in Kernel
Development and pretty much the only thing keeping me from tracking the
upstream kernel (and using my distros relatively old 4.13.15 kernel
instead) is the inability to play e.g. 4K YouTube videos using nouveau.

Now I know that the Feature Matrix [1] specifies Video Decoding
Acceleration for NV110+ cards as "TODO" (and all other 2D features as
"WIP"), but it also says that the matrix is updated rarely and might
thus be out of date.

This is why I wanted to inquire here whether or not any active
development is actually being done on this (quickly skimming the commit
logs seems to indicate otherwise).  I'd just like to know whether or not
it's even worth it for me to track the latest Git version of the kernel in
order to watch out for performance improvements.

Thanks for reading, I'm looking forward to your replies.

[1] https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FeatureMatrix/

--
Regards,
Christoph