No GPU in CPU (Xeon E3 series)
GPU is MSI half-height fanless GeForce GT 1030:
[user]$ sudo lshw -C display
*-display
description: VGA compatible controller
product: GP108 [GeForce GT 1030]
vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
version: a1
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
configuration: driver=nouveau latency=0
resources: irq:37 memory:f6000000-f6ffffff memory:e0000000-efffffff memory:f0000000-f1ffffff ioport:e000(size=128) memory:c0000-dffff
In CentOS 7, I had no choice but to use the proprietary driver, nouveau crashed a lot and couldn’t handle two displays. With the proprietary driver, it actually could play “second life” (Firestorm viewer) so I assume there is some hardware acceleration available but I am not actually a gamer and don’t even play second life anymore.
In Fedora 42, nouveau works just fine.
HOWEVER on an html5 test page for H265, the extremely high resolution videos do stutter. Resolutions normally used for HTML5 video work just fine with H265.
I’d like to see if hardware acceleration would help, but with the open source nouveau driver. According to vdpauinfo I need libvdpau_nouveau.so which is not shipped with Fedora because of firmware license issues. I understand RPMFusion has it but I haven’t enabled that and would prefer to build it myself. Oddly it looks like there is a Fedora 43 package that works in Fedora 44 but not a Fedora 44 package, but maybe I’m misunderstanding?
But before I go down that rabbit hole, does the libvdpau_nouveau.so driver support my specific card? I gather it does not support all nVidia cards but I can’t seem to find a clear table of which are supported.
VideoAcceleration · freedesktop.org is the closest I found to such a table, but it doesn’t mention my card series and the
dmesg | grep -i chipset
command it references does not give any results.
That page does (down in Troubleshooting area) give hints for building mesa with libvdpau_nouveau.so and on getting the firmware, I just don’t know if it is even worth trying for my card.
Okay I was able to find a bit more information out.
My card is a Pascal NV130 series - and according to:
video decoding acceleration is still on the TODO list for that engine.
It seems that if I was going to use RPMFusion, the mesa-va-drivers-freeworld is the package I’d need but it seems using them causes often update dependency issues with Fedora as sometimes updates take longer to get pushed, so I might be better off building mesa myself with an alternate prefix. Advantage is I could potentially run the latest built just for my card, disadvantage is there probably would be unexpected behavior with some applications and it wouldn’t be Fedora’s bug to fix.
It’s possible that I should start building my own kernels again to make sure I have most recent nouveau driver.
But since at the moment there’s zero benefit, I’ll just keep things the way they currently are.
Not sure why you’d want to use the Nouveau driver - it’s sub-optimal compare to the 580xx drivers that support your card and will undoubtedly perform better than nouveau.
I don’t like running a tainted kernel unless it is absolutely necessary.
Fair enough - performance left on the table but it’s your card so have at it.
I don’t game so performance is not really an issue.
I did want to see if running the hw acceleration would fix those high-resolution H.265 videos that stuttered but it actually looks like the only possible video decoding gains are with H.264 anyway, and the only H.265 videos I’ve had problems with were on a test page that pushes the limits specifically to push the limits.
IIRC, VDPAU is not supported by nouveau on any GPU newer than Kepler or Maxwell. VDPAU is irrelevant these days anyway.
I think your best option to enable HW decoding might be via mesa-va and mesa-vulkan drivers.
You’ll need to install mesa-va-drivers-freeworld and mesa-vulkan-drivers-freeworld from the rpmfusion-free* repos. Those drivers enable support for x264 and x265.
use vulkaninfo |grep VK_KHR_video and vainfo to list available codecs.
Another problem is the missing re-clocking on Pascal GPUs. Maybe you need to re-clock the GPU manually for better HEVC decoding performance.
AFAIK there is no HW acceleration on any nvidia GPU when using the nouveau drivers. Only the nvidia drivers are able to take advantage of the HW acceleration.
Yes, it’s confusing because Mesa in a transition. I just found that out, so a lot of pages out there are old info.
Mesa is no longer supporting VDPAU as of December 2025 and that’s why the RPMforge packages for fc44 don’t have it. The Vulkan driver will work with many GPUs but currently not mine, it’s still listed as “TODO”, but in the future it likely will.