Submitted via IRC for takyon
Continuing on from the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 expectations on Linux shared earlier this week, here's a list of ten reasons why Linux gamers might want to pass on these soon-to-launch graphics cards from NVIDIA.
The list are various reasons you may want to think twice on these graphics cards -- at least not for pre-ordering any of them right away. Not all of them are specific to the Turing GPUs per se but also some NVIDIA Linux infrastructure problems or general Linux gaming challenges, but here's the list for those curious. And, yes, a list is coming out soon with reasons Linux users may want to consider the RTX 20 series -- well, mostly for developers / content creators it may make sense.
Here is the list:
- Lack of open-source driver support
- It will be a while before seeing RTX/ray-tracing Linux games
- Turing appears to be a fairly incremental upgrade outside of RTX
- The GeForce GTX 1080 series already runs very well
- Poor Wayland support
- The Linux driver support for Turing is unclear
- These graphics cards are incredibly expensive
- SLI is next to worthless on Linux
- VR Linux support is still in rough shape
- Pascal prices will almost surely drop
That's the quick list outside of my detailed pre-launch Linux analysis. A similar list of the pros for the RTX 20 series on Linux will be coming out shortly. It will certainly be interesting to see after 20 September how the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20 series works on Linux.
Source: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=10-Reasons-Pass-RTX-20-Linux
Previously: Nvidia Announces RTX 2080 Ti, 2080, and 2070 GPUs, Claims 25x Increase in Ray-Tracing Performance
Related Stories
Nvidia's Turing pricing strategy has been 'poorly received,' says Instinet
Instinet analyst Romit Shah commented Friday on Nvidia Corp.'s new Turing GPU, now that reviews of the product are out. "The 2080 TI is indisputably the best consumer GPU technology available, but at a prohibitive cost for many gamers," he wrote. "Ray tracing and DLSS [deep learning super sampling], while apparently compelling features, are today just 'call options' for when game developers create content that this technology can support."
Nvidia shares fall after Morgan Stanley says the performance of its new gaming card is disappointing
"As review embargos broke for the new gaming products, performance improvements in older games is not the leap we had initially hoped for," Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore said in a note to clients on Thursday. "Performance boost on older games that do not incorporate advanced features is somewhat below our initial expectations, and review recommendations are mixed given higher price points." Nvidia shares closed down 2.1 percent Thursday.
Moore noted that Nvidia's new RTX 2080 card performed only 3 percent better than the previous generation's 1080Ti card at 4K resolutions.
NVIDIA Announces the GeForce RTX 20 Series: RTX 2080 Ti & 2080 on Sept. 20th, RTX 2070 in October
NVIDIA's Gamescom 2018 keynote just wrapped up, and as many have been expecting since it was announced last month, NVIDIA is getting ready to launch their next generation of GeForce hardware. Announced at the event and going on sale starting September 20th is NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 20 series, which is succeeding the current Pascal-powered GeForce GTX 10 series. Based on NVIDIA's new Turing GPU architecture and built on TSMC's 12nm "FFN" process, NVIDIA has lofty goals, looking to drive an entire paradigm shift in how games are rendered and how PC video cards are evaluated. CEO Jensen Huang has called Turing NVIDIA's most important GPU architecture since 2006's Tesla GPU architecture (G80 GPU), and from a features standpoint it's clear that he's not overstating matters.
[...] So what does Turing bring to the table? The marquee feature across the board is hybrid rendering, which combines ray tracing with traditional rasterization to exploit the strengths of both technologies. This announcement is essentially a continuation of NVIDIA's RTX announcement from earlier this year, so if you thought that announcement was a little sparse, well then here is the rest of the story.
The big change here is that NVIDIA is going to be including even more ray tracing hardware with Turing in order to offer faster and more efficient hardware ray tracing acceleration. New to the Turing architecture is what NVIDIA is calling an RT core, the underpinnings of which we aren't fully informed on at this time, but serve as dedicated ray tracing processors. These processor blocks accelerate both ray-triangle intersection checks and bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) manipulation, the latter being a very popular data structure for storing objects for ray tracing.
NVIDIA is stating that the fastest GeForce RTX part can cast 10 Billion (Giga) rays per second, which compared to the unaccelerated Pascal is a 25x improvement in ray tracing performance.
Nvidia has confirmed that the machine learning capabilities (tensor cores) of the GPU will used to smooth out problems with ray-tracing. Real-time AI denoising (4m17s) will be used to reduce the amount of samples per pixel needed to achieve photorealism.
Previously: Microsoft Announces Directx 12 Raytracing API
Nvidia Announces Turing Architecture With Focus on Ray-Tracing and Lower-Precision Operations
Related: Real-time Ray-tracing at GDC 2014
(Score: 5, Informative) by boltronics on Wednesday September 12 2018, @03:44AM (24 children)
If you're on GNU/Linux, you would have to be mad to purchase Nvidia. That is, unless you just run Ubuntu and don't care about free software support and must have the fastest possible card.
If you're on Nvidia, you're never going to get the best out of the box experience due to the proprietary drivers, which last I checked nobody shipped by default. Nouveau (nvidia free software drivers) has significant issues making it not terribly useful on any modern card.
The main hindrance to using an AMD card is the lack of FreeSync support on GNU/Linux, and that is about to change [phoronix.com]. The drivers for AMD cards are really quite wonderful at this point.
I remember it used to be that if you wanted to game under GNU/Linux in any serious capacity, you basically had to use an Nvidia card with their proprietary drivers. These days, Nvidia will generally give you the most frustrating experience. How the tables have turned.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @03:52AM (6 children)
It's simple. If you are into gaming on Linux you go Nvidia. There is no choice. Anything else is a gamble whether they games you need will work.
(Score: 2) by black6host on Wednesday September 12 2018, @04:01AM
On linux, it's a gamble on whether any game will work! :) Just kidding... Please, really.... I love linux, some of my best operating systems have been linux. Ok, well, maybe some unix but close enough, ok?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Wednesday September 12 2018, @04:45AM (3 children)
"they games you need"
If you are so addicted to fashion that you really *need* a specific game so badly that you're buying your hardware based on it, then why wouldn't you just run Windows? This is what I don't get at all. What's the appeal to Linux?
It's not having a Free OS, because you don't have that anymore once you give Nvidia blobs root. If getting the currently popular games running is your primary reason for having the PC, then why would you try to run them on a platform that is not only not supported by most games, but ideologically hostile to them as well?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @05:04AM (2 children)
I'm pretty sure "games you need" is not a hard concept to understand, it has nothing to do with "popular".
Anyway, you are likely not a gamer if you are this confused. With nvidia on Linux it just works (most of the time anyway), with everything else it's "guess, pray and tweak until it does". Sometimes it just "only nvidia cards are supported, everything else – you are on your own".
Your "Free OS" argument might have applied if I used gNewSense or something. If you are going full scale war on proprietary you might as well nuke your BIOS and CPU. Have to draw a line somewhere if I want anything work at all.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday September 12 2018, @05:12AM (1 child)
I'm pretty sure it means that you *need* specific games.
In other words, that this is not an optional desire - it's a need - for a specific game from a specific source.
Which is why you have to work with what that specific source works with.
"Anyway, you are likely not a gamer if you are this confused."
I'm not at all confused, and I was likely a gamer before your father made the fatal mistake of looking at your mother.
"With nvidia on Linux it just works (most of the time anyway), with everything else it's "guess, pray and tweak until it does"."
Uhuh.
And what is "it" please?
The first occurrence of the word "it" in that sentence, to what noun does that pronoun refer?
"Sometimes it just "only nvidia cards are supported, everything else – you are on your own"."
And why does that matter to you, that sometimes someone might not support you?
What sort of support do you require?
"Your "Free OS" argument might have applied if I used gNewSense or something. If you are going full scale war on proprietary you might as well nuke your BIOS and CPU. Have to draw a line somewhere if I want anything work at all."
Work? What work? Weren't we talking about games?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @08:13PM
You could totally go back to lurking y'know.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by urza9814 on Wednesday September 12 2018, @02:59PM
Ugh. Yeah, I dropped $2000 on a System76 gaming laptop a couple years back. Tried really hard to game on that thing for a couple months, eventually I gave up and upgraded by desktop with all AMD so I could just use that instead, and now my laptop might as well be a chromebook because all it's good for is browsing the web.
The problem is that BOTH NVidia drivers are complete fucking garbage. Some games only work with Nouveau, some games only work with proprietary drivers, but as far as I can tell very few games will work with both. Which means nearly every time you want to play a different game, you've gotta go through a whole process of changing your graphics drivers. And praying that doing so doesn't screw up your system and that the game will actually work when you're done.
Have yet to find any games that won't run on my AMD system. I'm actually not even sure what drivers it's using -- I think the open source ones, but it might be running proprietary. I don't know, I don't care, because I've never had to mess with it. Everything just seems to work.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @04:01AM (9 children)
Oh, and what is this default you are speaking of? Even Debian has nvidia proprietary driver in its repository. You are just going to install it along with everything else after a minimal install, once. Ain't that how you install your system? Nobody plays on nouveau (ok, that's probably not completely true, but nonetheless).
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Wednesday September 12 2018, @04:23AM (4 children)
I've yet to see a system where nouveau *doesn't* lock the system on boot. Booting a freshly installed Linux typically involves rebooting from the installer disk or other live cd, so I can mount the root partition and add a blacklist entry for the nouveau driver.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Whoever on Wednesday September 12 2018, @05:29AM (3 children)
My work desktop runs fine with Nouveau.
It went through a period that, after several weeks of use, I would see some odd effects when dragging windows from one monitor to another, but I haven't seen that problem for quite some time.
(Score: 3, Informative) by coolgopher on Wednesday September 12 2018, @06:29AM (2 children)
Can I ask what card you're using? I've been having issues with, off the top of my head, 650, 760, 960, and 1050.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Whoever on Wednesday September 12 2018, @03:08PM (1 child)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF108 [GeForce GT 420] (rev a1)
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Thursday September 13 2018, @01:46AM
Ah, a real classic model, that could explain it :)
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday September 12 2018, @10:27AM (3 children)
That is inaccurate. Proprietary drivers are pretty easy to install on Debian, but Debian doesn't host those drivers. I use smxi to install my kernels and drivers - it's almost brain-dead simple. Going through the menus, you are given the option to install nvidia-latest. If you choose that option, then smxi connects directly to an nvidia server, to download the latest proprietary driver.
Alternative für Deutschland
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @03:19PM (2 children)
What? nvidia-driver, nvidia-kernel-dkms, etc. aren't actually drivers?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday September 12 2018, @10:40PM (1 child)
I haven't used nvidia-driver in quite a long while - isn't that just a script, which downloads the nvidia proprietary driver? Hell, let me just look to see what it is exactly . . .
So - you're installing a metapackage. What does the metapackage do, exactly? I suspect that it is grabbing the proprietary driver from an Nvidia server. I'm not absolutely sure about that. Someone who knows for sure, can confirm or correct that.
Alternative für Deutschland
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @07:44AM
Metapackage doesn't do anything, it's a package to install other packages via its dependencies. Basically, you don't need nvidia servers in Debian, unless you want latest versions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @04:12AM
True. If you use Nvidia, use their proprietary driver. Nouveau still not there.
(Score: 5, Informative) by qzm on Wednesday September 12 2018, @05:56AM (5 children)
Because you want OpenGL drivers that work, CUDA support, and the best performance per dollar?
Yes, I get exactly that you love free and open software, but some of use are actually doing work with tools we call computers, rather than trying to progress a political position.
And Intel, AMD, etal pretty much suck for anything other than the basics, unfortunately.
If you think they are at all feature complete, reliable, and fast then you are NOT running software that actually needs such cards, sorry.
And no, 'wayland' is not an example of software that needs a high end graphics card, even slightly.
Face it, ANY graphics card (hell, these days, a damn frame buffer) is more than enough for basic GUI work.
The rubber hits the road in other applications these days - you know, the types of things where dropping $1k+ on a video card actual makes sense.
And for those, NVidia delivers by FAR the best performance.
Your argument seems to be 'I dont want a drivers license, so no one should EVER buy a Ferrari, because I dont like having to have a drivers license!, you all should use pushbikes'
And you are dead wrong. Stop confusing politics with technical merit.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday September 12 2018, @10:29AM
Very well stated - thank you!
Alternative für Deutschland
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @10:30AM
Note the article is directed towards gamers and even in the submission...
So with these caveats I agree with you, the article author may well agree with you too ;) I guess the argument could be summarized as "professional gamers aren't running linux and these cards are too expensive for casuals leaving the market as industrial / academic users and idiots"?
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday September 12 2018, @03:04PM
Doesn't matter how good the performance is if the drivers are such garbage that they can't actually run the applications that you want to run.
I spent a hell of a long time with my laptop trying to get shit working with the piece of garbage NVidia card. I install proprietary drivers, and I get error messages that the app crashed and I should be using the Nouveau drivers. So I switch to the Nouveau drivers, and apps that were working fine with the proprietary drivers no longer work. So then every time you get a new game or other graphically demanding app, you try it, and then if it doesn't work you go through the whole process of reinstalling your graphics drivers and praying that fixes it...and sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes you're just screwed.
Never had an issue with my AMD cards though. I literally don't even know which drivers I have installed, because I haven't needed to. It just works. Everything I throw at it just works. Maybe the performance isn't quite as good, but I don't care because all the performance in the world isn't worth shit if I can't actually use any of it.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @10:18PM (1 child)
Freedom is more important than technical merit. Until people understand that, our world is going to continue to be filled with proprietary black boxes that abuse, spy on, and restrict users. And those are not avoidable even to people like Richard Stallman, since any businesses he deals with probably use such abusive black boxes.
(Score: 2) by qzm on Thursday September 13 2018, @06:16AM
Great, could you please give me your home address and a copy of the keys to your front door?
After all, Freedom!
Oh, you meant freedom for YOU, I see...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Wednesday September 12 2018, @06:03AM (5 children)
Why would NVidia want to hold on to driver code anyway? Drivers are not their profit center. Selling graphic boards is. But the driver is required or the boards won't sell.
What's the deal with keeping the code under wraps? To me, this seems to make just about as much sense as if Elon Musk started keeping the locations of Tesla charging stations under wraps. What the heck do I want with a car that I don't know where to charge it? Or buy a car that runs on toluene.
I would think all of the graphics card vendors oughta be more than happy to share how to use their product, just to encourage more people to buy the hardware.
I have bought hundreds of ATMEL 328 chips ( hopefully, one day I will be buying millions of them! ), but I would not have bought one had the Arduino framework that educated me on to how to use these chips not been in existence. There would have been a good chance I used PIC processors instead.
Does the ATMEL executives know a marketing trick that the NVidia executives aren't aware of? Like letting the customers know how to use their product?
Once customers understand what is out there, they design it into things... and isn't that what damn near every manufacturer wants? His thing designed into something else? Meaning every time his customer makes a sale, he made one too! But by observation, that seems to be a difficult concept for some marketing executives to comprehend.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Aiwendil on Wednesday September 12 2018, @06:31AM (2 children)
Cost, laziness, speed-of-deployment, and secrecy (secrets of the trade)
Basically is it a lot easier, cheaper and faster to put logic in software than in hardware, and adding an "interface module" would mean extra cost.
I strongly suspect nvidia has taken a shortcut that is quite normal with supercomputers in that they expose _everything_ (caches, computing units...) to the software, and this basically means that the software will tell you in detail how the underlying piece of hardware works - so I wouldn't be surprised if their properiatary driver also contains a JIT-compiler for the card in question and that lots of the logic for how to stuff the pipes and arrange the workflow is in there rather than in silicon (this also would mean that a lot of their competetive edge is in the drivers).
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Wednesday September 12 2018, @01:27PM
There is indeed a JIT compiler as part of the drivers (libnvidia-ptxjitcompiler.so).
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Arik on Wednesday September 12 2018, @03:27PM
Don't forget plain old stupidity.
"(this also would mean that a lot of their competetive edge is in the drivers)."
Well, yeah, sort of.
Their drivers (the bits of them that work as they should, at least) are definitely key to making their hardware perform, which is why the lack of good linux drivers costs them sales.
But the implication that you are clearly taking from this that documenting their hardware would destroy that advantage is way off.
You think they're revealing secrets? There are just a handful of players and if there are any secrets between them they're very short lived. These guys are pros, they don't need a proper driver, they grab the competitors product off a store shelf and combine it with a proper test rig and they can figure out what's going on. The 'secret' side of this, in any business important sense, probably has more to do with patents. These same players have made their field into a patent minefield, and published source code *could* make it easier to spot and sue for patent infringement. This gives them incumbent advantage, and they like this, of course, but it's not at all good for the rest of us.
That's the downside for them. The upside would be that their hardware would find a wider market initially, and once some time went by this could also help their own development process going forward. So it would make the competitive advantage in those drivers *greater*, not less, over time.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by rigrig on Wednesday September 12 2018, @09:30AM (1 child)
No, they want NVIDIA developers to help game developers optimize things, because that way games end up performing best on NVIDIA hardware.
No one remembers the singer.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday September 13 2018, @12:00PM
Old hardware engineer here.... and I remember back in my heyday of the 80's, how sales reps were stumbling all over themselves, bringing us all sorts of databooks, samples, anything it took, to get us to design their chips into the stuff we made.
If we did not know how it worked, no way were we designing the thing in because we thought it looked cool.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday September 12 2018, @12:19PM
Meh, I haven't bought NVidia in half a decade. When I last did, I went for their low end, a GEForce GT 610, to replace an older but still functioning Nvidious card with a bad fan. Of course the card I got was fanless, so I'd never have that problem again. Even when the fan was fine on the original card, it was still horrible. Sounded like a whiny hair dryer.
The sort of games I play don't need high end graphics. I haven't ever mined digital currencies. For years I tried to get the dream combination of top end graphics with top speed and quality open source drivers, hopped back and forth between Nvidious and ATI, dallied with Voodoo when they still existed and kept an eye open for anyone else who might step up, such as Matrox. No one stepped up. Intel's integrated graphics were the joke of the graphics industry, with unbelievably slow and lame performance. The add on video cards of the early 2000s scored around 200 on Passmark's benchmarks, while Intel's integrated garbage might score a 1 ("one"), a huge, huge performance gap, so big that many games were simply not playable on integrated graphics. Now, I find integrated graphics has improved tremendously and delivers adequate performance, it's not a 200 to 1 ratio any more, it's more like 10 to 1. You'll want to run at a lower resolution, and set the graphics options to their lowest levels, but it is playable.
More important to me now is dual monitor.