the context is: the 470 legacy driver doesn't compile on the linux 6.12 kernel. because of that, debian decided to officially drop support to that driver. i tried installing the driver myself using nvidia's official installer, but the installation indeed fails during the module compilation stage.
this means i am stuck with nouveau. it got better since i last tested it on bookworm, but one major pain in the ass is that nouveau has no support for performance levels for my card and it runs at the lowest clock bc of that (~400 megahertz instead of its max ~900 mhz).
this causes a noticeable performance hit, even for desktop usage, but it's good enough for work. waching full hd 60 fps video is a bit painful, but it's possible. but gaming, which was possible, got way worse. even a lightweight game like celeste got frustrating to play due to stuttering.
i guess i'll have to deal with it and maybe this is the cue to buy another graphics card and never buy nvidia again, but i'm thinking about what my options would be here:
- downgrade to bookworm. not easy to do, would only delay the problem.
- install an older kernel and use only that. not sure how, the official repos only have the 6.12 kernel. i could get the older kernel from the bookworm backports and pin it to prevent any updates, but mixing repos from different versions makes me uneasy.
- patch the driver. there are a few patches floating around that make nvidia's driver compile on the 6.12 kernel. applying the patch by hand is annoying and i would have to re-apply it at every kernel update.
- cope.
any ideas?
edit
and it runs at the lowest clock bc of that (~400 megahertz instead of its max ~900 mhz).
that was a mistake. i was reading the clock off of my onboard video chip, which also happens to be nvidia. the onboard chip is at .../dri/0; my graphics card is at .../dri/1. nouveau seems to support reclocking for my card, but i'm trying to change the clock and the video signal goes crazy when i do it
id usually avoid nvidia as well but sadly this was the cheapest option to me at the time
it's an amd fx 8300 🥲
i should've told my pc is old
Then check if your PC/power supply can run an AMD or intel gpu. If not, upgrade your PC. You can get a BeeLink minipc for $180 that's faster than your current computer.
i'm pretty sure there's an equivalent radeon card for around the same price and i'm willing to buy it as soon as i can, but i'm trying to get as much mileage as i can out of my current card
You won't. You will get crashes. This is a very old nvidia driver, which was barely working on x11, and not at all on wayland. Their newer drivers are more serious. You'd be best to upgrade your PC, not just an old amd card. I personally have found many bugs that DIDN;T exist 10 years ago on open source drivers. Basically, as the kernel evolves, and the old drivers become unmaintained, new bugs emerge. So it's best to get something new, a new pc, and not try to make this old nvidia or old amd card to work. If you can spare $180, you'll be in a much better shape.
that's not my experience with it at all. on bookworm with the proprietary it worked pretty well (with only occasional crashes every other month). even now it works fine aside from the lower performance (and no suspend).