Ben Skeggs at Red Hat has long been the primary Nouveau DRM kernel driver maintainer for keeping this open-source NVIDIA GPU kernel driver within the mainline kernel going… Throughout all the battles, particularly after the GTX 900 series and later has required signed firmware images for enabling any accelerated GPU support, he’s now resigning from maintaining the driver. Ben Skeggs has contributed to the Nouveau project for more than one dedace – he’s earned references on Phoronix since 2008.
I think sadly you’d either way get much better performance with proprietary drivers especially if the focus is generative AI.
Yeah.
The FOSS/Hobbyist Linux community will never stop talking about how much they hate the nvidia drivers. And… even among a buddy or two who work for nVidia, we make semi-sarcastic jokes about how “Hey, nvidia only killed my linux install once in the past few months”.
But for gaming purposes? I don’t play a lot of the cutting edge games, but even going by stuff like https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-windows11-ubuntu2304 we can see that the performance is effectively parity. ~10% hit if you are going through proton but that is the kind of noise you get from having too many chrome tabs open or whatever*. If I was still a total sicko for game performance I would care more but… I am too old for that shit. I would rather still be a first class citizen than get drivers once or twice a year but… meh.
And for research/compute/data science reasons? There is absolutely zero reason to ever use the nouveau drivers for that. If you are going to buy the expensive hardware, use the expensive hardware.
*: If you DO think 10% matters when going through a translation layer? I strongly encourage watching the Gamers Nexus response/manifesto/what the fuck here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUeZQ3pky-w as it goes into just how much variance there is between tests with the exact same hardware and software AND is Tech Jesus having a blast.