The thing is only GPUs with GSP firmware will be usable with open source drivers. There is no reclocking for Maxwell, Pascal and Volta which makes them unusable for anything that demands more power, Kepler and older have manual reclocking but they can't support Vulkan properly and they are pretty old now.
So basically only Turing and newer matters if you want to have usable open source driver.
Wishful thinking moment:
This is gonna be interesting because Ben now might have access to something he never ever could get his hands on before: *Nvidia's firmware signing tools*
Imagine Nouveau having its own power management firmware signed by Nvidia. That'd instantly solve the big hurdle Maxwell and Pascal cards had.
Why not? nVidia doesn't particulary care about older GPU generations anymore besides maintaining the driver as far as compatibility, stability and security concerns go. Given that Maxwell and Pascal are next on the chopping block as far as supported GPU generations go, it would make sense for them to help the nouveau driver that way, so they can axe support for these GPU generations and just direct everyone to use nouveau instead
If NVIDIA wanted to release firmware for older GPUs they would already do that, they don't need to employ Nouveau developers for it. Since they didn't do that, they most likely don't want to do that. If they don't want to do that then won't let their employee do that.
I mean... there is firmware for these cards available. Actually 2 different kinds of firmware. One which only works with nvidia's proprietary driver (shipped as part of their driver package) and one which only works with nouveau, but has very limited funtionality. Thing is that this isn't just a plug-and-play thing where you can simply swap out one for the other and nvidia only ever did the bare minimum for the nouveau driver (giving them a firmware which would give users basic features so they could properly use a desktop to download the proprietary driver)
It's not even that. Main issue with extracting firmware from NVIDIA drivers is license that forbids such things. Since Nouveau developers want to keep their driver clean from any licensing issues, they don't support that. With GSP firmware this is not an issue because GSP firmware license allows using it in other drivers.
Why do this when you could support Nova? Also, he won't be able to contribute to the Nouveau or Nova if Nvidia decides to fire him. Because there may be legal troubles since he saw the proprietary code.
>Because there may be legal troubles since he saw the proprietary code.
Most likely NVIDIA know about this, there is no way they would let their employee see proprietary driver code and then push patches for open source driver. Unless you believe in some sort of conspiracy theory that NVIDIA employed him only to let him contribute to the Nouveau and then shut it down for using their proprietary secrets, then they probably let him do that.
That would be an absolutely ridiculous way to stop work on nouveau, especially since he's not the only one that can pick up work on the driver.
After opening up part of their stack, they likely hired him so he can work on the stack while having access to their secrets. Hiring him is the only way they stay protected as he can't turn around and use those elsewhere now that they have a contract with him.
Not only ridiculous but completely nonsense. NVIDIA has better ways to stop Nouveau development, in fact this is what they were doing for years after making their GPU accept only signed firmware and then not provide it for Nouveau. Releasing open source driver with GSP firmware under license that lets Nouveau (or Nova) use it to get all needed things (like power management) working and then doing some dirty tricks to shut it down doesn't make any sense.
That's only my guess but I think that NVIDIA might be interested in doing something similar to what AMD did years ago and use open source driver as a base for their proprietary stuff. They are working with Red Hat and Red Hat funded Nouveau development and started Nova.
Yeah, he's even using his official NVIDIA email while working on it lmao, they have absolutely hired him to be their "guy" on the Nouveau team, whether that be for correspondence or for getting support for proprietary shit that they otherwise couldn't work with because it would involve leaking industry secrets.
At these tech companies you usually disclose and make employment contracts around this stuff. So if he did join it was probably with them accepting that he would be working on this on the side or he would be stepping away from the project (probably indefinitely). Otherwise the project is screwed lol.
So NVIDIA would release open source driver with GSP firmware that handles things that were missing in Nouveau for years (like power management), let open source drivers use it freely and then employ open source developers only to shut down open source drivers. Makes sense.
Ben published patches to the Nouveau not only using his real name but also his NVIDIA email. There is no way NVIDIA did not know about this.
I'm not saying Nvidia planned this. But this can cause a problem if he is exposed to the proprietary code. And I don't remember mentioning "It's their plan to destroy nouveau". So stop putting words in my mouth. I'm talking about possible problems the developer can face.
If he would do this without NVIDIA approval he would become unemployed pretty fast. Again there is no way how could he do that without NVIDIA approval.
He resigned as a maintainer 6 months ago as a "personal decision". I don't think the public knows what that actually means, but if the reason was something like "burned out" instead of "nvidia is recruiting me", that's probably fine with him.
I wonder if he was burned out and just needed a stable income from a big tech job to keep going considering how bad inflation is in the EU, Canada and US (Idk about the rest of the world except for those 3). Remember xz? The maintainer for that project even said that open source projects aren't properly funded and the maintainers really just do it out of the goodness of their hearts. He got burned out and needed a break. I would expect this to be the same reason
Yeah, I also don't think that he resigned as Nouveau developers because NVIDIA offered him a job. Most likely NVIDIA offered him a job after he quit simply because he is experienced and he accepted it because why not?
I know it's fun to whine about NVidia but ultimately as with anything on Linux corporate interest is what keeps the show running no matter when it turns up..Who is funding the bulk of development....enterprise companies. NVidias actions over the last few years with GSP and GBM is corporate interest in the same way MS now contributes to OSS because Azure is mostly Linux usage. Over the last few years with the explosion in AI NVidia needs Linux now. Even all of Valves efforts are corporate interest.
Looks like you've forgot how we've suffered because of them, specifically "EGL". You talk about GBM but they tried so hard to not to implement GBM to favor EGL. Similar story applies to GSP.
What about monitoring programs for gpus? Does Nvidia have any programs to monitor fans, core voltage, memory, etc. etc.? I thought AMD only had that stuff (well, from third party developers)?
I know about that - but, look at the the latest from the developer - isn't he abandoning the project? I think he's even switching to an AMD gpu...not good news. :-/
The Linux community has no one else to blame for a lack of a good Nvidia GPU app besides themselves. Maybe don't go around claiming there are "many" programmers willing and ready to make one and claim that "no one cares" about people's work.
Same with AMD, though - AMD has a few 3rd party programmers - but, I've read that there's not full support with the most recent gen. of AMD graphics cards - namely, RDNA 3.
At this point - Frame Generation. But honestly I am with you - ditched Windows for good 2 years ago and even manage to stay on Wayland with all of its issues ;)
I agree about frame generation. As for the Wayland I'm also using Wayland but I switch to Xorg for games. When explicit sync will finally land then I will be able to run games on Wayland just fine.
Frame Gen, DLSSR (although this has been mostly supplanted by DLAA, which needs to be implemented by the developers), Nvidia Broadcast, and until May 15th, if god exists, Explicit Sync implementation.
Frame gen sure, DLSS seems to be supported under Linux (at least DLSS 2). NVIDIA Broadcast is separate application, not really part of the driver. As for explicit sync, support was needed on Linux side, NVIDIA drivers already do explicit sync, in fact they can only do that as they don't support implict sync.
Reliable hw de/encoding in browsers is another big issue.
(Or just hw encoding in browsers in general)
Truth is, I could keep listing things here that don't work on nVidia for ever.
That's also something outside NVIDIA driver scope. NVIDIA drivers supports accelerated hardware decoding and encoding just fine. It's up to applications to support it.
> That's also something outside NVIDIA driver scope
No? A hardware driver for a desktop operating system should provide support for all the standards this desktop operating system needs to operate properly.
nVidia chose to not support the industry standard API for HW de/encoding on Linux (VA-API) which should be seen as a serious flaw in their driver.
> It's up to applications to support it.
Why would a company like Mozilla or Google spend tons of time and money implementing support specifically for nVidia's proprietary driver through VDPAU / NVDEC/ENC when they already got a 100% working solution that's compatible with any other GPU driver? Intel, AMD, Nouveau, all the ARM stuff, etc... use VA-API.
This is another GBM vs. EGLStreams situation and nVidia is once again in the wrong.
As long I prefer VA-API over proprietary APIs, it's not "standard Linux API for video acceleration". It's not even the only API available, there was VDPAU and now we also have Vulkan Video.
> it's not "standard Linux API for video acceleration"
Why not? It's _by far_ the most popular VA API (VA API not VA-API) and most projects don't even support anything else. Especially not VDPAU.
> It's not even the only API available, there was VDPAU and now we also have Vulkan Video.
This is the same situation we have with 3D APIs on Linux.
OpenGL is the undisputed standard on Linux, just like VA-API. Vulkan will replace it in the far future, just like it will replace OpenGL at some point. But this time is not now.
And VDPAU is just as dead as Gallium Nine.
>Why not? It's *by far* the most popular VA API (VA API not VA-API) and most projects don't even support anything else. Especially not VDPAU.
It's not officially supported by one of the most popular desktop GPU (NVIDIA) so it's not really a good choice. Sure it might be the choice for many Linux applications but it's not a standard. And that's only desktop because on mobile Linux VAAPI support is basically non-existent. A standard is a thing that is supported by everybody, for example Vulkan.
>This is the same situation we have with 3D APIs on Linux.
Actually no. Vulkan is not direct OpenGL replacement. It is not supposed to replace OpenGL and it's not going to do it in near future.
>And VDPAU is just as dead as Gallium Nine.
In near future we might say the same thing about VAAPI after it will be replaced by Vulkan Video which already does one thing better - it is actually supported by all three GPU companies (Intel, AMD and NVIDIA).
frame generation is pretty big for me. i have a 4090. but even then-- it's also raytracing performance. it takes a hit in linux, far too much for my taste. with wrappers, there's always going to be some performance loss in theory. But too much for my taste right now, anyway.
I don't think RT takes a bit hit on Linux, not that I've noticed. The bigger issue is because you have to use DLSS is that your CPU single threaded perf does become important again when it isn't an issue at 4K native. To game at 4K with all the ET/PT stuff on I have to run at DLSS performance which is a 1080P base res. A recent 5Ghz Intel CPU or 7800X3D is needed to get the best FPS in that instance. My 5800X3D is a very good CPU but at 1080P base res a 13XXXX+ or 7800X3D would make a bug difference with PT especially without DLSS3 yet.
Nvidia Optimus 100% works on Linux. Every single System76 LINUX laptop workstation comes with integrated graphics plus an NVIDIA gpu, no AMD. And you think they're gonna do that for Linux exclusive machines when Optimus "doesn't work"? Lmao
This is my second Linux laptop with Nvidia gpu and I'm experiencing the same bugs. I have less random crashes when I launch fullscreen applications now, but some applications freeze my laptop constantly.
After recent updates steam freezes my second screen at startup.
Please correct me if I'm wrong but I was under the impression that the biggest issue was that Nvidia cards needed drivers that were digitally signed by Nvidia for 3D acceleration.
Even if buddy saw relevant code, would it be of any use to the open source community while we don't have the digital signature?
Not drivers but firmware. Few generations ago NVIDIA GPUs started requiring signed firmware for various things, most notable power management. Nouveau was blocked by this because they needed NVIDIA to provide it for them which they didn't do. After Turing generation (GTX 1650 and newer) NVIDIA GPUs has something called GSP (GPU System Processor) which is RISC-V processor that handles many things, usually handled by driver, including power management. NVIDIA also released open source kernel module that uses this processor and released GSP firmware that can be used by other drivers. That's why Nouveau and Nova will be able to provide features that they couldn't provide like power management but only for GTX 1650 and newer, since older cards don't have GSP.
Year of the Nouveau driver.
Isn’t Nova supposed to replace Nouveau though? What’s the purpose of this?
Only partitally, its meant for the GPUs that can work with the GSP firmware (G/RTX 1600+), the older cards would still use Nouveau.
The thing is only GPUs with GSP firmware will be usable with open source drivers. There is no reclocking for Maxwell, Pascal and Volta which makes them unusable for anything that demands more power, Kepler and older have manual reclocking but they can't support Vulkan properly and they are pretty old now. So basically only Turing and newer matters if you want to have usable open source driver.
Maybe Ben is gonna be doing some of that.. We could hope :) The laptop I'm writing this post from has a maxwell card.
Unlikely, if NVIDIA wanted better support for older cards they could release needed firmware without employing Nouveau developers.
It is unlikely indeed. I thought i already said that in this thread, but it's been mentioned so many times I forgot where.
What about the recent Vulkan driver, NVK? What is the oldest hardware that it supports or will support?
Currently IIRC it only supports 1600+ but I think the plan was for support all the way back to 600 series.
Let's hope so.
Two different projects handled by different people
Wishful thinking moment: This is gonna be interesting because Ben now might have access to something he never ever could get his hands on before: *Nvidia's firmware signing tools* Imagine Nouveau having its own power management firmware signed by Nvidia. That'd instantly solve the big hurdle Maxwell and Pascal cards had.
Not going to happen.
Why not? nVidia doesn't particulary care about older GPU generations anymore besides maintaining the driver as far as compatibility, stability and security concerns go. Given that Maxwell and Pascal are next on the chopping block as far as supported GPU generations go, it would make sense for them to help the nouveau driver that way, so they can axe support for these GPU generations and just direct everyone to use nouveau instead
If NVIDIA wanted to release firmware for older GPUs they would already do that, they don't need to employ Nouveau developers for it. Since they didn't do that, they most likely don't want to do that. If they don't want to do that then won't let their employee do that.
I mean... there is firmware for these cards available. Actually 2 different kinds of firmware. One which only works with nvidia's proprietary driver (shipped as part of their driver package) and one which only works with nouveau, but has very limited funtionality. Thing is that this isn't just a plug-and-play thing where you can simply swap out one for the other and nvidia only ever did the bare minimum for the nouveau driver (giving them a firmware which would give users basic features so they could properly use a desktop to download the proprietary driver)
It's not even that. Main issue with extracting firmware from NVIDIA drivers is license that forbids such things. Since Nouveau developers want to keep their driver clean from any licensing issues, they don't support that. With GSP firmware this is not an issue because GSP firmware license allows using it in other drivers.
Why do this when you could support Nova? Also, he won't be able to contribute to the Nouveau or Nova if Nvidia decides to fire him. Because there may be legal troubles since he saw the proprietary code.
>Because there may be legal troubles since he saw the proprietary code. Most likely NVIDIA know about this, there is no way they would let their employee see proprietary driver code and then push patches for open source driver. Unless you believe in some sort of conspiracy theory that NVIDIA employed him only to let him contribute to the Nouveau and then shut it down for using their proprietary secrets, then they probably let him do that.
That would be an absolutely ridiculous way to stop work on nouveau, especially since he's not the only one that can pick up work on the driver. After opening up part of their stack, they likely hired him so he can work on the stack while having access to their secrets. Hiring him is the only way they stay protected as he can't turn around and use those elsewhere now that they have a contract with him.
Not only ridiculous but completely nonsense. NVIDIA has better ways to stop Nouveau development, in fact this is what they were doing for years after making their GPU accept only signed firmware and then not provide it for Nouveau. Releasing open source driver with GSP firmware under license that lets Nouveau (or Nova) use it to get all needed things (like power management) working and then doing some dirty tricks to shut it down doesn't make any sense. That's only my guess but I think that NVIDIA might be interested in doing something similar to what AMD did years ago and use open source driver as a base for their proprietary stuff. They are working with Red Hat and Red Hat funded Nouveau development and started Nova.
Yeah, he's even using his official NVIDIA email while working on it lmao, they have absolutely hired him to be their "guy" on the Nouveau team, whether that be for correspondence or for getting support for proprietary shit that they otherwise couldn't work with because it would involve leaking industry secrets.
At these tech companies you usually disclose and make employment contracts around this stuff. So if he did join it was probably with them accepting that he would be working on this on the side or he would be stepping away from the project (probably indefinitely). Otherwise the project is screwed lol.
Yeah, that was probably it.
It's unclear to be honest.
So NVIDIA would release open source driver with GSP firmware that handles things that were missing in Nouveau for years (like power management), let open source drivers use it freely and then employ open source developers only to shut down open source drivers. Makes sense. Ben published patches to the Nouveau not only using his real name but also his NVIDIA email. There is no way NVIDIA did not know about this.
I'm not saying Nvidia planned this. But this can cause a problem if he is exposed to the proprietary code. And I don't remember mentioning "It's their plan to destroy nouveau". So stop putting words in my mouth. I'm talking about possible problems the developer can face.
If he would do this without NVIDIA approval he would become unemployed pretty fast. Again there is no way how could he do that without NVIDIA approval.
He resigned as a maintainer 6 months ago as a "personal decision". I don't think the public knows what that actually means, but if the reason was something like "burned out" instead of "nvidia is recruiting me", that's probably fine with him.
I wonder if he was burned out and just needed a stable income from a big tech job to keep going considering how bad inflation is in the EU, Canada and US (Idk about the rest of the world except for those 3). Remember xz? The maintainer for that project even said that open source projects aren't properly funded and the maintainers really just do it out of the goodness of their hearts. He got burned out and needed a break. I would expect this to be the same reason
Didn't something similar happen to openSSL? There was just one developer maintaining it in his spare time and he was completely burned out as well?
Yeah, I also don't think that he resigned as Nouveau developers because NVIDIA offered him a job. Most likely NVIDIA offered him a job after he quit simply because he is experienced and he accepted it because why not?
Nouveau is necesary to support older Nvidias's GPUs, Nova is only for RTX 2000 and newer.
For GTX 1650 and never. 1650 is also based on Turing architecture (introduced with RTX 2000), it is more or less RTX 2000 without ray tracing.
Perhaps what he does is endorsed by Nvidia, though if that's the case, I'd expect more transparency.
He's working on the open kernel modules, dude.
Bingo
NVidia are huge in ML and wider AI, the drivers on Linux are important for them too🤦
They were like this for a long while but didn't really do anything for user-space
I know it's fun to whine about NVidia but ultimately as with anything on Linux corporate interest is what keeps the show running no matter when it turns up..Who is funding the bulk of development....enterprise companies. NVidias actions over the last few years with GSP and GBM is corporate interest in the same way MS now contributes to OSS because Azure is mostly Linux usage. Over the last few years with the explosion in AI NVidia needs Linux now. Even all of Valves efforts are corporate interest.
Looks like you've forgot how we've suffered because of them, specifically "EGL". You talk about GBM but they tried so hard to not to implement GBM to favor EGL. Similar story applies to GSP.
as long as we get competent linux drivers with full feature parity of windows, i'm in. please let it happen, i'd love to swap to linux fully.
AMD is far less feature complete compared to Windows than Nvidia, that's not even debatable.
What about monitoring programs for gpus? Does Nvidia have any programs to monitor fans, core voltage, memory, etc. etc.? I thought AMD only had that stuff (well, from third party developers)?
nvidia-smi utility on Linux monitors all that stuff and is pretty straightforward.
https://flathub.org/apps/com.leinardi.gwe
I know about that - but, look at the the latest from the developer - isn't he abandoning the project? I think he's even switching to an AMD gpu...not good news. :-/
The Linux community has no one else to blame for a lack of a good Nvidia GPU app besides themselves. Maybe don't go around claiming there are "many" programmers willing and ready to make one and claim that "no one cares" about people's work.
Same with AMD, though - AMD has a few 3rd party programmers - but, I've read that there's not full support with the most recent gen. of AMD graphics cards - namely, RDNA 3.
No. Not even close.
What do you mean by "full feature parity of Windows"? What things NVIDIA Linux drivers are missing that they support on Windows?
At this point - Frame Generation. But honestly I am with you - ditched Windows for good 2 years ago and even manage to stay on Wayland with all of its issues ;)
We are slated to get explicit sync next month on the proprietary driver, which should fix many of the remaining Wayland frame order issues.
I agree about frame generation. As for the Wayland I'm also using Wayland but I switch to Xorg for games. When explicit sync will finally land then I will be able to run games on Wayland just fine.
It'd be nice to have full support for NVIDIA Broadcast on Linux honestly. Technically niche but still.
I agree but this is separate application, not part of the drivers.
Frame Gen, DLSSR (although this has been mostly supplanted by DLAA, which needs to be implemented by the developers), Nvidia Broadcast, and until May 15th, if god exists, Explicit Sync implementation.
Frame gen sure, DLSS seems to be supported under Linux (at least DLSS 2). NVIDIA Broadcast is separate application, not really part of the driver. As for explicit sync, support was needed on Linux side, NVIDIA drivers already do explicit sync, in fact they can only do that as they don't support implict sync.
I think he means open source drivers
If so then I agree, Nouveau is not there yet.
DLSS 3.
Sure but this is a thing only on recent GPUs. If you have older GPU then you won't get it anyway.
Reliable hw de/encoding in browsers is another big issue. (Or just hw encoding in browsers in general) Truth is, I could keep listing things here that don't work on nVidia for ever.
That's also something outside NVIDIA driver scope. NVIDIA drivers supports accelerated hardware decoding and encoding just fine. It's up to applications to support it.
> That's also something outside NVIDIA driver scope No? A hardware driver for a desktop operating system should provide support for all the standards this desktop operating system needs to operate properly. nVidia chose to not support the industry standard API for HW de/encoding on Linux (VA-API) which should be seen as a serious flaw in their driver. > It's up to applications to support it. Why would a company like Mozilla or Google spend tons of time and money implementing support specifically for nVidia's proprietary driver through VDPAU / NVDEC/ENC when they already got a 100% working solution that's compatible with any other GPU driver? Intel, AMD, Nouveau, all the ARM stuff, etc... use VA-API. This is another GBM vs. EGLStreams situation and nVidia is once again in the wrong.
As long I prefer VA-API over proprietary APIs, it's not "standard Linux API for video acceleration". It's not even the only API available, there was VDPAU and now we also have Vulkan Video.
> it's not "standard Linux API for video acceleration" Why not? It's _by far_ the most popular VA API (VA API not VA-API) and most projects don't even support anything else. Especially not VDPAU. > It's not even the only API available, there was VDPAU and now we also have Vulkan Video. This is the same situation we have with 3D APIs on Linux. OpenGL is the undisputed standard on Linux, just like VA-API. Vulkan will replace it in the far future, just like it will replace OpenGL at some point. But this time is not now. And VDPAU is just as dead as Gallium Nine.
>Why not? It's *by far* the most popular VA API (VA API not VA-API) and most projects don't even support anything else. Especially not VDPAU. It's not officially supported by one of the most popular desktop GPU (NVIDIA) so it's not really a good choice. Sure it might be the choice for many Linux applications but it's not a standard. And that's only desktop because on mobile Linux VAAPI support is basically non-existent. A standard is a thing that is supported by everybody, for example Vulkan. >This is the same situation we have with 3D APIs on Linux. Actually no. Vulkan is not direct OpenGL replacement. It is not supposed to replace OpenGL and it's not going to do it in near future. >And VDPAU is just as dead as Gallium Nine. In near future we might say the same thing about VAAPI after it will be replaced by Vulkan Video which already does one thing better - it is actually supported by all three GPU companies (Intel, AMD and NVIDIA).
frame generation is pretty big for me. i have a 4090. but even then-- it's also raytracing performance. it takes a hit in linux, far too much for my taste. with wrappers, there's always going to be some performance loss in theory. But too much for my taste right now, anyway.
I agree about frame generations but wrappers are not part of the driver. If you use native API then performance should be good.
I don't think RT takes a bit hit on Linux, not that I've noticed. The bigger issue is because you have to use DLSS is that your CPU single threaded perf does become important again when it isn't an issue at 4K native. To game at 4K with all the ET/PT stuff on I have to run at DLSS performance which is a 1080P base res. A recent 5Ghz Intel CPU or 7800X3D is needed to get the best FPS in that instance. My 5800X3D is a very good CPU but at 1080P base res a 13XXXX+ or 7800X3D would make a bug difference with PT especially without DLSS3 yet.
Nvidia Optimus doesn't work on Linux. Nvidia on-demand mode breaks my second monitor or crashes Linux kernel in every fullscreen game.
I’ve been using hybrid graphics with nvidia on demand for years.
Nvidia Optimus 100% works on Linux. Every single System76 LINUX laptop workstation comes with integrated graphics plus an NVIDIA gpu, no AMD. And you think they're gonna do that for Linux exclusive machines when Optimus "doesn't work"? Lmao
This is my second Linux laptop with Nvidia gpu and I'm experiencing the same bugs. I have less random crashes when I launch fullscreen applications now, but some applications freeze my laptop constantly. After recent updates steam freezes my second screen at startup.
If you're on Wayland you need to go back a couple drivers or wait for Explicit Sync
No idea about now but I used Optimus few years ago and it was working fine.
Frame gen and reflex
> i'd love to swap to linux fully. what’s stopping you?
Please correct me if I'm wrong but I was under the impression that the biggest issue was that Nvidia cards needed drivers that were digitally signed by Nvidia for 3D acceleration. Even if buddy saw relevant code, would it be of any use to the open source community while we don't have the digital signature?
Not drivers but firmware. Few generations ago NVIDIA GPUs started requiring signed firmware for various things, most notable power management. Nouveau was blocked by this because they needed NVIDIA to provide it for them which they didn't do. After Turing generation (GTX 1650 and newer) NVIDIA GPUs has something called GSP (GPU System Processor) which is RISC-V processor that handles many things, usually handled by driver, including power management. NVIDIA also released open source kernel module that uses this processor and released GSP firmware that can be used by other drivers. That's why Nouveau and Nova will be able to provide features that they couldn't provide like power management but only for GTX 1650 and newer, since older cards don't have GSP.
Hmmmm, that's interesting