best gpu acceleration?
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i started a pc build intending it for trisquel and, as i do a fair bit of video editing and some light gaming, i wanted to get some clarification on what the best performing foss gpu drivers are at the moment. i'm still fairly new to the understanding the linux-libre side of things so bear with me.
i went into this originally assuming that amd would be the go-to option as they've had a history of open-sourcing their drivers as well as with vulkan becoming more prevalent. according to the trisquel website itself under "Configure 2D and 3D Graphics Acceleration" in the documentation, the radeon driver used in the distro is severely stripped down due to those drivers' proprietary dependencies and thus performs very poorly. this has cast doubt on my initial decision, prompting this post. are there any updates on amd's performance? is vulkan and/or the amdgpu driver unrelated to this?
additionally, i also wanted to know the viability of the nouveau replacement, nvk, in the mesa driver stack of which, as of trisquel 12, supports a version of mesa with nvk included. has anyone tested nvk in trisquel so far?
i've been struggling to find clear info on gpu performance on trisquel in general, i do hope something can be done about this.
As I understand it, Kepler was the last that allowed the nouveau driver to perform 3D acceleration without requiring any proprietary, signed firmware. The GeForce GTX 780 Ti is the best you can get to have free software 3D acceleration.
nvk is for modern Nvidia cards (RTX 2000 and up). Since they're newer than Kepler the cards require Nvidia's proprietary firmware. AMD has also gone downhill. Newer cards give you basic software rendering, assuming that they even work at all.
cheers for the reply. according to mesa3d.org's website, there is nvk support these days for kepler and onwards. would that still work on a fully foss system or are there still some other proprietary dependencies i'm not yet aware of?
As jxself told you: the problem is that "the cards require Nvidia's proprietary firmware".
he also said that "Kepler was the last that allowed the nouveau driver to perform 3D acceleration without requiring any proprietary, signed firmware." so, since nvk now supports that architecture, wouldn't that mean that a fully-libre system would be able to utilise the drivers on those cards?
I am a member!
The requirement for a signed proprietary firmware blob is inherent to the card. The card won't work (or will have reduced functionality) without the blob.
NVK is a kernel driver, it can't do anything about the requirement for firmware blob, since that exists in the card itself.
i appreciate the advice. i hope i'm not being too irritating in this thread, but i'm struggling to put two and two together here a little so please be patient. i just want to make sure i understand.
the firmware blobs inherent to nvidia cards you're referring to, are they also inherent to the kepler architecture? i ask because jxself referred to that generation as not having to require any proprietary, signed firmware to function in a libre system. is what you're referring to something different?
if not, since nvk is now compatible with kepler cards as of late last year, wouldn't i now have a card capable of not requiring proprietary blobs to function in a libre system and be able to take advantage of nvk?
I see that my information on nvk was outdated, and you're limited to Vulkan 1.2. The driving factor is what can be used in freedom, not what nvk supports, so the hardware answer remains the hardware answer regardless of whatever state nvk's in. :)
thanks mate. i'm looking at a gtx 770 for my trisquel system. might make a video benchmarking various things with it to showcase what it can achieve with the latest drivers.
Depends on what you are building. If you are building an older system that can be gnubooted or canoebooted then you will want to look into the GeForce GTX 780 Ti. If you are building a newer system, the Intel chips with integrated Xe or Arc graphics can be made to work with the recent linux-libre kernels from the freesh repository. Up through Alder Lake everything works pretty much out of the box.
With Meteor Lake and beyond, with their integrated Arc graphics, it takes a bit more configuration to get graphics acceleration working with Linux-libre, and you will probably be left with some nasty screen tearing, which you may be able to alleviate (or mitigate) by using the latest Xlibre in place of Trisquel's Xorg, due to Xlibre's screen tearing fixes. My writeup on working through these issues (sans the Xlibre changeout) is here: https://trisquel.info/en/forum/new-novacustom-computer-intel-meteor-lake-integrated-arc-graphics-still-works-jxselfs-linux-li
Changing to Xlibre from Xorg on any Ubuntu-based distro like Trisquel is pretty simple.
One option for building a system with an Alder Lake chip is using the MSI PRO Z690-A WiFi DDR4 motherboard for which Dasharo Coreboot has been ported, allowing things such as disabling IME and using fewer proprietary blobs than a typical modern system. @jxself has argued that the MSI PRO Z690-A WiFi DDR4 is a massive step back in software freedom compared to his preferred Asus KGPE-D16 which can be flashed with gnuboot or canoeboot, and he is correct in that assessment. If you prefer to build an Asus KGPE-D16 then you would probably want to look into the GeForce GTX 780 Ti.
One thing to note is that @jxself is the one who builds the Linux-libre kernels on his Asus KGPE-D16 machines for the freesh repository. And he helped diagnose and fix some earlier problems that allowed Intel Xe and Arc graphics to work with the freesh repo versions of Linux-libre. So he definitely knows what he's talking about, and you should pay very close attention to his advice.
Those Asus KGPE-D16 motherboards have enormous cpu core and ram capacity and can clearly do a large amount of work based on the number of kernels @jxself compiles, so that is an avenue that is well worth looking into.
thanks for the reply. i appreciate the info. i am personally looking to build as close to a fully foss system as feasibly possible so whatever i can canoeboot i'd vastly prefer. i'm not necessarily looking for the most horsepower, but to at least have a foss system where the drivers perform acceptably relative to what is typically expected from nouveau.
with nvk's support added to kepler, i'm hoping that with the lack of proprietary nvidia dependencies required to run that series will make for a decent experience. the 780ti, for instance, might be faster on a libre system than ever before.
I have both a Talos II and an Asus KGPE-D16. I tested several GPUs with those systems.
The NVIDIA Corporation G96C [GeForce 9500 GT] (rev a1) works with petitboot only with the Talos II, it does not work with my D16.
I also tried other NVIDIA GPUs with the Talos II and found out that the GPU does not show up in lspci at all. Not a good sign.
So I went with AMD instead. Unfortunately the GPU needs non-free firmware too. As a skilled reverse engineer and hardware designer, I think I should work on a liberation effort. Recently I found out about a few simple GPU designs that can run on an FPGA. Soon I plan to buy an Arctic Tern from raptorcs.com
>"The NVIDIA Corporation G96C [GeForce 9500 GT] (rev a1) works with petitboot only with the Talos II"
Is that a good thing? I don't know much about petitboot or about the 9500 GT - does that give you workable graphics, or not?
No unfortunately not. The Nouveau Linux driver does not work with 64KiB pages, which I used for a long time. Non-free firmware needed for video decoding acceleration.
That is why I am now looking for libre designs for prototyping a better GPU using an FPGA and other reverse engineering/research projects:
https://github.com/ToNi3141/RasteriCEr
https://github.com/ToNi3141/RasterIX
https://raptorcs.com/content/AT1PC2/intro.html
https://github.com/jbush001/NyuziProcessor
https://librerpi.github.io