Hi,
I made vkdt run with an Nvidia 1660 Super without the proprietary Nvidia driver. I am using the new nvk driver, but it’s incredibly slow, like slower than with a cheap integrated gpu. But I guess this driver is primarily intended for gaming.
My original motivation for this was: I am playing around with the wayland compositor Hyprland which kind of does not like the proprietary Nvidia driver.
Ok. The first more or less successful test was on Manjaro which has an older kernel. Now I installed vulkan-nouveau-git on Garuda and added a kernel parameter for Nvidia power management and now vkdt seems to be actually usable. Some modules like deconv seem to be a bit slow and building up one thumbnail takes like 1 or 2 seconds. But editing/darkroom mode is more or less ok, although not as fast as with the proprietary driver.
Have your read this @hanatos ? I think you are on Debian and don’t have nvk?
Edit: btw, I heard from AMD users that building up the thumbnails takes long time. I kind of have the feeling that the performance of nvk is approximately like AMD with the open source driver.
Thanks for sharing!
crazy idea 
usually thumbnail speed is completely io bound, i.e. depends more on the ssd speed than on anything else. there’s also quite a bit of difference between the raw files themselves. some encoding is faster to turn into pixels than others. that’s a cpu/rawler/rawspeed issue, and varies between 20ms and almost 3 seconds just to decode the file. i bet this is more the issue than amd. as usual, try to run vkdt -d perf to find out where it’s spending the time.
re: gaming: the vulkan api might have been introduced because of this but it’s the same stack here. drivers running games fast, i don’t see a reason why they would be exceptionally slow for vkdt/compute.
i really like the idea to have a good open source nvidia driver in the future. probably won’t be before another couple of years go by though 
fwiw in my limited wayland tests it runs just fine with nvidia. everybody hates nvidia, so you need to pass idiotic command line switches sometimes, and also the dual intel/nvidia setup has quite some issues. i did get a vanilla weston + nvidia + vkdt session to work well though.
Most of the time Hyprland works well with the proprietary driver, but when the computer wakes up form suspend it crashes and restarts, so all the open apps are gone. Well it’s a question of personal preference, in this case either you have good Vulkan performance+suspend bug, or bad performance+no suspend bug(+no opencl at all).
But I guess I was just curious if/how vkdt works with NVK. I have the impression that there is quite a bit excitement around this NVK at the moment.
I did not test other wayland/wlroots compositors yet, but KDE Plasma 6/Wayland seems to work fine with Nvidia, I didn’t notice any suspend/wakeup bugs or similar. But I guess I didn’t use it that much yet.
I think NVK will improve sooner than you think. Time flies…
I wonder if the devs can make darktable work without Xwayland. I bet X11 will be removed in most Debian/Ubuntu flavours by 2027.
Didn’t test dual nouveau/NVK/intel yet though…
[perf] [rawloader] load /run/media/anna/968A-0DBC/20210623/P6232624.ORF in 832ms
This is very typical… the very same thumbnails on the same ssd are loaded much faster with the Nvidia driver. But I think this could be expected with NVK.
the time you cite is measured around cpu operation only. if you can consistently get that number to be lower with other gpu drivers there is something extremely unusual going on.
I definitely can. So I better report this to NVK? I can measure because I did not destroy my Kubuntu LTS system yet.
Something is really strange. If I build the thumbs of the very same directory on Kubuntu with the Nvidia driver, I get similar numbers for rawloader:
[perf] [rawloader] load /media/anna/968A-0DBC/20210623/P6232624.ORF in 680ms
This particular raw file is a bit better on Kubuntu/Nvidia, but the others are similar and there are even ones that need 1000-1500 ms.
However, 680 milliseconds are a bit more than 2/3 of a second, right? Yet in vkdt/lighttable building up the thumbs feels much faster, like 3 thumbs in 1 second.
In general, rawloader needs about 300 ms less on Kubuntu, if vkdt -d perf can be trusted.
So the average is about 500 ms for rawloader.
orcas!
thanks for recording. these numbers sound really typical to me for some raw file types.
??? no, just pilot whales
