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Trying out nouveau with the new kernel

I'm a bit confused about what's going on but as far as I understand, due to NVIDIA allowing redistribution of their blobs, nouveau can now set the clock speed of GPUs. This is giving us a huge boost in performance in nouveau.

How exactly do I test this out? Arch wiki does not say anything about NVK, but I see it's mentioned on everything about this change. Do I need to do anything to get/use NVK other than uninstalling the proprietary driver? And, are we getting a performance boost only on Vulkan?

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aurtzy

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I've been having my own fun trying out NVK on Guix System so I can't give you specific instructions (assuming you're not using Guix), but I can tell you what you need and maybe someone else can chip in on how/if you need to do anything else on your distro:

Linux kernel >= 6.7
GSP firmware enabled via the kernel parameter nouveau.config=NvGspRm=1
Mesa built with the -Dvulkan-drivers=nouveau-experimental flag.

A few notes:

Performance and stability of games has been fairly hit-or-miss for me. Of the 10 Vulkan games I've tried so far: 3 run perfectly, 3 are playable with noticeable issues, and 4 are borked.
NVK is Vulkan-only, but performance largely comes from the GSP firmware so you will still see a difference (huge for me) in games not using Vulkan.
You can override flatpaks to use the host's Mesa version (set FLATPAK_GL_DRIVERS=host); however, there's a bug that causes the Steam Flatpak to not work when doing this. The mesa-git-extension Flatpak exists which can also be used to replace Mesa runtimes, but it had issues building with NVK so it's currently disabled.

The only package I'm aware of at the moment (other than my hacked-together Guix package) is available in the AUR.

leopold

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While NVK is indeed Vulkan-only, it also isn't, thanks to Zink, which is a Gallium3D implementation for Vulkan. Gallium3D implements OpenGL, among other things. NVK + Zink has already been reported to be substantially faster than the old Nouveau Gallium3D driver.