Hot dogs
Freddy's fry sauce, barbecue sauce, teriyaki sauce, honey mustard, cocktail sauce, malt vinegar, cheese sauce
Are you testing this on a Raspberry Pi? The PAN_ prefix seems to indicate this is a configuration for the Panfrost driver (which is the open source driver for ARM Mali GPUs) and the Raspberry Pi does not use an ARM Mali but rather a Broadcom VideoCore GPU, so I don't see how this would affect the Raspberry Pi.
The only instance I can see this is if a game requires a new Vulkan extension, which wouldn't need a new kernel but would need a new Mesa version to provide that extension. For the most part, games use established and standardized APIs (OpenGL, Vulkan, Direct3D) to utilize the GPU and as long as the driver implements the APIs used by the game, the driver doesn't need to continuously update in order to support game updates. On Linux, the driver doesn't handle Direct3D anyways and an intermediate layer (DXVK or VKD3D) is used to translate Direct3D API calls into the Vulkan API. Vulkan does support extensions which are added every so often to provide new interfaces and the userspace portion of the driver (which is responsible for compiling/translating Vulkan API calls into raw GPU instructions) needs to be updated to support these, but also sometimes these extensions are optional and games can use less optimized code paths to work around missing extensions.
I wish these implementations of secure boot were designed more to protect the SOFTWARE against "theft" than the HARDWARE against "tampering". Let us wipe the secure boot keys, but in the process erase the firmware (or have the firmware encrypted so that erasing the keys renders it unbootable) and then allow new code to run. Blocking third party firmware on consumer devices is a shit move. It just creates more e-waste when the OEM stops updating it and the community can't make their own replacement firmware.
Pretty much all ext4 except for a few Windows installs on NTFS.
True, but if you buy a finished product that uses the new chip that has secure boot enabled, you can't flash your own firmware. From what I gather, the boot keys are burned into OTP memory so they can't be erased or changed. The chip is permanently locked to that firmware.
The kernel driver is a rather small piece of the overall puzzle though, itps just the pipe that GPU commands are passed through. The bulk of the GPU driver code (and the majority of its impact on performance) is in the userspace components like the shader compiler and the OpenGL/Vulkan libraries. These are closed source.
The exception to this rule is that the kernel driver is responsible for power management and controls the GPU clocks, but as part of opening up the kernel driver NVIDIA made reclocking available for the fully open driver (nouveau/nvk) to use as well which means the performance differences between the two driver stacks are now down to optimizations.
Yeah, NVIDIA will do that to you. That still sounds too low though, are you using the NVIDIA proprietary drivers? I'm not sure Fedora ships NVK yet as it is rather new, I think became mostly usable around Mesa 24.0 earlier this year.
I got a Radeon 7800XT in March and have had no significant issues with it on Arch Linux. The issues I have had were from running the bleeding-edge mesa-tkg-git drivers which are the pre-release development builds, and sometimes things break there (I had a weird issue where red and green got swapped in X11 apps). You have to go out of your way to run those drivers though, stick with the released version in your distro's repository and you'll be fine. I can play most games above 100Hz at decent resolution and quality. I have a 4K 144Hz monitor with Freesync but for more demanding games usually need to turn down settings a bit or use resolution upscaling like FSR. I upgraded from an Intel Arc A770 and it was a big performance increase.
AMD (or anything that uses Mesa drivers really) just works out of the box. That pain is unique to NVIDIA.
How is the external display connected? I have never seen Freesync over HDMI work. The early implementations were AMD proprietary and the new ones require HDMI 2.1 which has some ridiculous bullshit about not being implemented by open source drivers. HDMI sucks, use DisplayPort if possible. If your laptop doesn't have a DisplayPort connector, try a USB-C to DisplayPort cable, as usually the type C ports on laptops support DisplayPort alt mode.