glfs/shareddeps/drivers/whatdriver.xml

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<sect1 id="whatdriver" xreflabel="What Drivers to Install">
  <?dbhtml filename="whatdriver.html"?>


  <title>What Drivers to Install</title>

  <para>
    On Linux, there are multiple drivers that one can install. Choosing
    the one you need can be difficult if you do not know what drivers
    are for what vendor and the perks and downsides of each option.
    This section explains all of that to better help you decide what
    you want or need.
  </para>

  <sect2>
    <title>AMD</title>

    <para>
      There are 3 AMD GPU drivers: AMDGPU (Radeon Southern Islands and later),
      ATI (r300 and r600), and AMDGPU PRO (proprietary AMDGPU driver).
    </para>

    <para>
      <emphasis>AMDGPU</emphasis>:
      this driver is for AMD GPUs that are Southern Island Cards or
      later. It is open source and is the most standard AMD GPU driver.
      This driver is in the Linux kernel and has two Mesa dri drivers:
      Gallium driver - <emphasis>radeonsi</emphasis> and Vulkan driver -
      <emphasis>amd</emphasis>.
    </para>

    <para>
      <emphasis>ATI</emphasis>:
      this driver is for the ATI AMD GPUs which precede GCN GPUs.
      It is open source and targets older GPUs. The driver is in the Linux
      kernel and has three Mesa dri drivers: Gallium drivers - <emphasis>
      r300</emphasis> and <emphasis>r600</emphasis>; and Vulkan driver -
      <emphasis>amd</emphasis>.
    </para>

    <para>
      <emphasis>AMDGPU PRO</emphasis>:
      this driver is proprietary. Most users don't install this driver
      as the open source drivers are already well off. However, it is
      needed for hardware acceleration encoding, useful for those who
      wish to record and edit videos. Performance in games varies between
      the open source and proprietary drivers so the ending factor is if
      you record and edit videos or not. You will need the firmware and
      open source kernel driver for this driver.
    </para>

    <para>
      Summary: If you are a regular user with a modern AMD GPU, use
      <emphasis>AMDGPU</emphasis>. If you have an older card, go with
      <emphasis>ATI</emphasis>. Use <emphasis>AMDGPU PRO</emphasis> if
      you want an improvement with hardware acceleration encoding.
    </para>

  </sect2>

  <sect2>
    <title>Intel</title>

    <para>
      Intel provides open source drivers, but for sake of simplicity, all
      the relevant open source drivers will be classified as one -
      <emphasis>i915</emphasis>. There is another driver called <emphasis>
      uvesafb</emphasis>.
    </para>

    <para>
      <emphasis>i915</emphasis>: this driver, or rather collection of drivers,
      is for most Intel integrated and discrete GPUs. It is a single option
      in the Linux kernel but has various Mesa Gallium3D and Vulkan dri drivers.
      There is a good list on the MESA page under Command Explanations that
      will explain what Gallium3D and Vulkan driver you will need.
    </para>

    <para>
      <emphasis>uvesafb</emphasis>: this driver is for the Intel GMA 3600
      series, a family of integrated video adapters based on the PowerVR
      SGX 545 graphics core. This driver was in the kernel since 3.5 but
      no longer since 4.15. This driver is not included in the book
      because of its lack of use by most people, but has a good Arch Linux
      wiki page at <ulink url="https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Intel_GMA_3600"/>.
    </para>

  </sect2>

  <sect2>
    <title>NVIDIA</title>

    <para>
      The situation revolving around NVIDIA is more unfortunate than
      the two vendors listed above and more complicated. NVIDIA does not
      support open source drivers besides their own open source kernel
      modules. Therefore performance with the open source drivers,
      <emphasis>Nouveau</emphasis> and <emphasis>NVK</emphasis>, are
      worse than NVIDIA's proprietary driver, although installing the
      proprietary driver is easier and doesn't require installing
      lib32-<application>mesa</application> for multilib. There is another
      driver called <emphasis>Zink</emphasis> which translates Vulkan
      calls to OpenGL calls, and performance between <emphasis>Nouveau
      </emphasis> and <emphasis>Zink</emphasis> varies. It isn't NVIDIA
      specific but performance will probably improve. It is a Gallium3D
      driver in <xref linkend="mesa"/> and doesn't require extra kernel
      options enabled.
    </para>

    <para>
      <emphasis>Nouveau</emphasis>: this driver is open source and
      has worse performance than <emphasis>NVIDIA</emphasis>. It is
      technically all a kernel driver, a Mesa Gallium3D driver, and
      Mesa Vulkan driver, although they have different parts and the
      Vulkan driver is often referred to as <emphasis>NVK</emphasis>,
      depsite being referred to as nouveau in Mesa's <parameter>
      -Dvulkan-drivers=</parameter> option.
    </para>

    <para>
      <emphasis>NVK</emphasis>: this driver is a new Mesa dri driver
      and in its production, involved several kernel patches. It is
      a Vulkan driver targetting Turing and later NVIDIA GPUs. It does
      provide better performance than <emphasis>Nouveau</emphasis> and
      is still improving. If you want to compile this driver, you are
      going to need Rust, and if you are doing multilib, are going
      to need the i686-unknown-linux-gnu target. Also make sure to install
      <emphasis>Nouveau</emphasis> if you want to install this driver.
    </para>

    <para>
      <emphasis>NVIDIA</emphasis>: This is the proprietary driver and
      the most often recommended for NVIDIA GPU owners using Linux.
      The performance of this driver exceeds the open source alternatives
      and allows the use of NVIDIA's CUDA project, useful for hardware
      acceleration, improving performance of games and workstation
      applications. This driver has a lot of issues to this day but
      still provides better performance, thus its installation is
      provided in this book. Installing this driver also prevents the
      need to install lib32-Mesa and lib32-LLVM if you are doing multilib.
      Firmware also isn't needed as it is provided by this driver.
    </para>

    <para>
      Summary: if you want good performance and care about workstation
      use cases, install <emphasis>NVIDIA</emphasis>. If you only use
      OpenGL applications and don't want the proprietary NVIDIA driver,
      use <emphasis>Nouveau</emphasis>. If you use a variety of
      applications and play games that utilize DirectX and Vulkan, install
      both <emphasis>Nouveau</emphasis> and <emphasis>NVK</emphasis>.
    </para>

  </sect2>

</sect1>