Nouveau - Nov 2017 - State of Video Decoding for Maxwell cards

Hi Everyone,

I have a Maxwell Card (GTX 970/NV 110) and would very much like to use
nouveau to drive it.  The problem is that the performance -- especially
when decoding high-resolution video -- seems to be relatively poor
compared to the proprietary Nvidia driver.  I'm interested in Kernel
Development and pretty much the only thing keeping me from tracking the
upstream kernel (and using my distros relatively old 4.13.15 kernel
instead) is the inability to play e.g. 4K YouTube videos using nouveau.

Now I know that the Feature Matrix [1] specifies Video Decoding
Acceleration for NV110+ cards as "TODO" (and all other 2D features as
"WIP"), but it also says that the matrix is updated rarely and might
thus be out of date.

This is why I wanted to inquire here whether or not any active
development is actually being done on this (quickly skimming the commit
logs seems to indicate otherwise).  I'd just like to know whether or not
it's even worth it for me to track the latest Git version of the kernel in
order to watch out for performance improvements.

Thanks for reading, I'm looking forward to your replies.

[1] https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FeatureMatrix/

--
Regards,
Christoph

Well, you are most likely using the CPU for decoding here. Currently
nobody is working on that, because this is quite a big and challenging
project. We have an open project idea regarding this for EVoC and GSoC
though:
"Maxwell Accelerated Video Decoding"
https://www.x.org/wiki/SummerOfCodeIdeas/

On Thu, Nov 30, 2017 at 1:18 PM, Christoph Böhmwalder
<christoph at boehmwalder.at> wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
>
> I have a Maxwell Card (GTX 970/NV 110) and would very much like to use
> nouveau to drive it.  The problem is that the performance -- especially
> when decoding high-resolution video -- seems to be relatively poor
> compared to the proprietary Nvidia driver.  I'm interested in Kernel
> Development and pretty much the only thing keeping me from tracking the
> upstream kernel (and using my distros relatively old 4.13.15 kernel
> instead) is the inability to play e.g. 4K YouTube videos using nouveau.
>
> Now I know that the Feature Matrix [1] specifies Video Decoding
> Acceleration for NV110+ cards as "TODO" (and all other 2D
features as
> "WIP"), but it also says that the matrix is updated rarely and
might
> thus be out of date.
>
> This is why I wanted to inquire here whether or not any active
> development is actually being done on this (quickly skimming the commit
> logs seems to indicate otherwise).  I'd just like to know whether or
not
> it's even worth it for me to track the latest Git version of the kernel
in
> order to watch out for performance improvements.
>
> Thanks for reading, I'm looking forward to your replies.
>
> [1] https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FeatureMatrix/
>
> --
> Regards,
> Christoph
> _______________________________________________
> Nouveau mailing list
> Nouveau at lists.freedesktop.org
> https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/nouveau

On Thu, Nov 30, 2017 at 01:35:58PM +0100, Karol Herbst
wrote:
> Well, you are most likely using the CPU for decoding here. Currently
> nobody is working on that, because this is quite a big and challenging
> project. We have an open project idea regarding this for EVoC and GSoC
> though:
> "Maxwell Accelerated Video Decoding"
https://www.x.org/wiki/SummerOfCodeIdeas/
Thanks for the reply! I guess I'll just monitor the mailing list for
movement on that front then.

--
Regards,
Christoph