LinuxMusicians

I'd like to hear from anyone who has experimented and compared the performance of JACK when running with and without either the Nvidia or ATI proprietary drivers vs their open source alternatives.

I'm aware the non-free drivers usually offer better OGL support, better performance and better power management but some users would sacrifice those if JACK is happier.

Please mention if you use(d) JACK1 or 2

Thanks!

Free/non-free NV: http://askubuntu.com/questions/232439/l ... plications
This is with the 3.2 kernel and iirc I still had this issue with the 3.6 kernel. So I'm using the proprietary driver. The open source radeon driver does not have this issue and I'm using that driver without any issues on my netbook. I'm using mainly Jack1 but I don't think there's a difference between Jack1 or Jack2 when it comes to video drivers.
As far as I can tell JACK runs happily with both the nvidia and the nouveau driver, I haven't experienced any noticeable difference. I have no experience with Ati vs radeon.

Thanks J!

I'd say your experience with NV matches mine. I also had text display progs with nouveau although I think there was a xorg.conf fix but I'm not sure I tried it

I didn't think JACK1 vs 2 was going to make any real difference here, but I thought it worth mentioning just in case.

danboid wrote:I'd say your experience with NV matches mine. I also had text display progs with nouveau although I think there was a xorg.conf fix but I'm not sure I tried it

brummer posted that fix a while ago on this forum, or maybe the guitarix forum. I've tried it but it didn't make a difference. Maybe the situation has improved with 3.8 but I haven't tried that yet.

Greetings,

I've used nVidia's drivers for many years. I have had problems with them in the past but currently I'm experiencing no difficulties. My work with AVSynthesis and occasionally Pd absolutely requires accelerated 3D, so it's pretty much been nVidia or nothing.

The two desktop machines here use fanless 7600GS cards, the laptop is equipped with an 8200M GPU. None of my machines are running with an rt kernel anymore, the low-latency kernel works all right for my needs. IIUC the rt kernel has the most problems with nVidia's drivers.

All machines here use JACK1. My next box will probably use JACK2.

Best,

dp

Thanks for the feedback Dave!

I've just installed the proprietary AMD Catalyst driver on AVLinux 6.0.1, and it's actually made a positive difference to the DSP load. I have an ASUS F2A85-M LE motherboard with an AMD A10-5700 APU (CPU + GPU on the one chip). Under the open source Radeon driver the DSP load was jumping about wildly from around 20 - 40 whilst running Ardour3 and a couple of soft-synths; with the Catalyst driver installed the DSP load stayed at a steady 20.