Benefits (or drawbacks) of Nouveau?

Hi all,
So, nvidia is nonfree, and that may (again, may) give rise to trouble (or…challenges).
What are the pro’s and cons of nouveau, instead?
Thanks
Melissa

With nouveau and mesa you do not have proper opencl or cuda support. This a relevant performance hit if you run programs who could make use of it, like darktable. The opencl performance of the nvidia drivers is significantly higher. I am not talking about some 10+ percent. I am talking about a factor of 3 and more depending on your GPU and CPU.

And before the AMD users jump in here and praise the open source AMD support in nouveau:
The AMD opencl functionality is also proprietary. Check out package opencl-amd. It installs binaries from the amdgpu-pro driver stack. No opensource here either.

2 Likes

only drawbacks with nouveau :

  • with nvidia cards , only 10% perf again proprietary drivers nvidia
  • no other support Cuda , OpenCL with nouveau
2 Likes

I see, so, sticking with the closed drivers is prefered…even though nvidia plans to quit Linux…

Where did you get that info from?

Read it up somewhere (cant remember where) unless I misread, of course…