NVIDIA 470 EOL Drivers For Kepler Still Obliterating Open-Source Alternative - Phoronix
With the recent NVIDIA 470 series Linux driver beta this R470 branch is the point at which NVIDIA is ending its GeForce 600/700 series "Kepler" support. The 470 driver series will be maintained as a long-lived driver that will continue to see security updates and Linux kernel / X.Org Server compatibility updates for another three years. If this end-of-life status has you thinking about trying out the open-source "Nouveau" Linux driver with Kepler, here are some current benchmarks.
The NVIDIA 470 driver series should keep working with new Linux distributions through 2024, but if the 470 series marking the end of the official driver road for Kepler has you thinking about Nouveau, the support is still far less than ideal.
In today's article are benchmarks of two Kepler cards, the GeForce GTX 680 and GTX 760, under both the NVIDIA 470 Linux driver beta and then the latest open-source Nouveau driver.
Unfortunately the Nouveau driver even for these nearly decade old Kepler GPUs still leaves a lot to be desired. Most pressing is these graphics cards still do not support automatic re-clocking for allowing the GPU core and memory frequencies ramp up to their nominal frequencies. By default this open-source driver still runs the hardware at its boot clock frequencies, which tend to be extremely low. Kepler on Nouveau though does allow manual re-clocking which by reading and writing to a DebugFS file the driver can force the GPU to its higher frequencies / performance states. But that is far from user-friendly and sub-optimal having to rely on the user to put their GPU into the desired performance state for gaming and then lowering it when not engaging the GPU, etc. Dynamic re-clocking sadly hasn't seen any real progress in recent years.
