Thanks for such a detailed explanations. That’s what I meant, I would love to avoid official drivers headache that causes you to avoid recommend Nvidia. Still there are some things that you cannot avoid it. Things I have in mind are better than AMD / Intel GPU with Mesa:
Blender
ML / AI / CUDA and so on
DaVinci Resolve (and other creative stuff like Blender above)
RayTracing
DLSS (FSR is catching up but this is #1)
I would love the Nvidia support just to be stable.
for the encoding and decoding I would choose Intel.
For gaming AMD as I’m currently right now with Bazzite.
Nouveau’s kernel driver is a horrible mess, so I’m looking forward to Nova, if it ever gets ready.
For older (pre-about-RTX 2000-series) cards, the kernel driver had to do a lot, and Nouveau had to reverse engineer most things. Now, Nvidia has moved most of the proprietary magic into something called the GSP (GPU System Processor), which is a small processor (RISC-V, IIRC) which does many things the kernel driver did previously, like reclocking. This, in addition to the official open kernel drivers should make developing a new FOSS Nvidia driver a lot easier. RedHat’s Nova (and I think Nvidia’s open driver) only support cards with a GSP for this reason.
NVK is very impressive for such a new unofficia Nvidia driver in my opinion. If I remember correctly, they said that they’ll focus more on optimization now that it’s conformant.
When/if Nova is ready, it will finally be possible to use a Rust graphics driver stack on Linux outside of Asahi.
Thanks for such a detailed explanations. That’s what I meant, I would love to avoid official drivers headache that causes you to avoid recommend Nvidia. Still there are some things that you cannot avoid it. Things I have in mind are better than AMD / Intel GPU with Mesa:
for the encoding and decoding I would choose Intel. For gaming AMD as I’m currently right now with Bazzite.
At least the situation will get better.
Nouveau’s kernel driver is a horrible mess, so I’m looking forward to Nova, if it ever gets ready.
For older (pre-about-RTX 2000-series) cards, the kernel driver had to do a lot, and Nouveau had to reverse engineer most things. Now, Nvidia has moved most of the proprietary magic into something called the GSP (GPU System Processor), which is a small processor (RISC-V, IIRC) which does many things the kernel driver did previously, like reclocking. This, in addition to the official open kernel drivers should make developing a new FOSS Nvidia driver a lot easier. RedHat’s Nova (and I think Nvidia’s open driver) only support cards with a GSP for this reason.
NVK is very impressive for such a new unofficia Nvidia driver in my opinion. If I remember correctly, they said that they’ll focus more on optimization now that it’s conformant.
When/if Nova is ready, it will finally be possible to use a Rust graphics driver stack on Linux outside of Asahi.
If you have any questions remaining, just ask.