Nvidia...yes, NVIDIA announces they're open sourcing their GPU drivers

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tlmiller
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Nvidia...yes, NVIDIA announces they're open sourcing their GPU drivers

Post by tlmiller »

More here.

Definitely something that falls in the category of utterly unexpected. Like, 100% caught off guard by this. Ultimately, this will force AMD's hand as far as driver quality. They could pretty much guarantee that anyone who REALLY was dedicated to open source would purchase AMD GPU's if they needed more than IGP. With Nvidia open sourcing their drivers, and the Intel GPU's slowly starting to actually be released, they're going to have to step up their game!!
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Re: Nvidia...yes, NVIDIA announces they're open sourcing their GPU drivers

Post by wove »

Nvidia drivers have long been the bane of the linux world, so this is indeed huge news. It seems to me that once AMD acquired ATI their video offerings have been declining in quality. Apple dumped them in 2012. I am not a cryto miner nor a gamer so it will have little direct impact on me. However, I am a firm believer that things should be open sourced. It just feels like everything ends up higher quality, and the state of the art is advanced quicker when lots and lots of eyes are looking at making something better.
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Re: Nvidia...yes, NVIDIA announces they're open sourcing their GPU drivers

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I personally feel that AMD's drivers have never been better since AMD bought out ATI. The old ATI proprietary drivers were UTTER garbage. AMDGPU works well for games. It sucks for OTHER 3d applications (CAD, video mastering, etc), but works good with games. The hardware itself is improving again, ATI had put out some REALLY sucktastic hardware there the last few generations before AMD bought them out. With Picasso they definitely started trending in the right direction. Mind you, Picasso was still a pretty big disappointment overall, and it underdelivered, but it's general level of competence can be seen in the fact that 3 full hardware generations later (Picasso > Vega > RDNA > RDNA2) you can STILL purchase BRAND NEW Picasso cards, and they're still reasonably competent at gaming!!
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Re: Nvidia...yes, NVIDIA announces they're open sourcing their GPU drivers

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AMD GPUs are excellent and their failure rate is hugely lower than their Nvidia counterpart. Many issues with Nvidia cards these days and honestly I wouldnt buy one. AMD drivers have been great for quite some time and most of the recent issues with drivers have come from the Nvidia side. This is true with both Linux and Windows.
If you want to see how bad it is first hand, take a look at Northridgefix on Youtube. Youll see that the majority of the huge number of video cards he receives for repairs are Nvidia cards of all types. Hes not the only one as it appears Nvidia has some component issues they need to resolve.
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tlmiller
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Re: Nvidia...yes, NVIDIA announces they're open sourcing their GPU drivers

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I'm just talking in regards to pure performance. AMD hardware was WAY behind Nvidia for a while. Picasso came close-ish (Picasso overclocked, aka 500 series, came even closer). Vega was closer, and Vega64 even scored a (very) few wins against it's direct competitors (although was more expensive due to using HBM instead of GDDR). RDNA was REALLY close to being on par with Nvidia hardware of the same level (since RDNA was never marketed above the mid-range), and RDNA2 is on par overall. They have MUCH worse performance on ray tracing, but the pure pixel pushing power in games they're actually somewhat ahead. But compare 2 cards of the same level in doing something like CAD acceleration. A 3070 will outperform a 6700XT (a card that is absolutely RIGHT ON PAR with it in gaming) on the order of something like 5:1. And yes, a big part of it is drivers, AMD's gaming drivers simply aren't well designed to do anything OTHER than gaming.
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Re: Nvidia...yes, NVIDIA announces they're open sourcing their GPU drivers

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Ray tracing really isnt that important to most gamers and Nvidia has always pushed newer features even though the overall gaming market wasnt really using them. AMD had been conservative with their drivers and stuck to making them stable for gaming. Ive had far fewer issues with their drivers versus Nvidia. When I out that much cash out for a video card I want stable, reliable with good performance. Pushing the envelope overall doesnt get you much down the road. Eventually you add the features that are supported and improve the drivers.
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Re: Nvidia...yes, NVIDIA announces they're open sourcing their GPU drivers

Post by wove »

Apple created a new graphics backend "Metal" to replace their "Quartz" backend. Apple said that AMD graphics did not support it, and AMD was not interested in making new drivers. When Apple updated to Mojave support was dropped for hardware using AMD graphics. It was considered odd that Intel HD 3000 graphics did support "Metal" so hardware from 2008-2010 could be upgraded to the new OS, while machines from 2011 to 2013 could not be upgraded to the new OS.

I was not in a position where that mattered. I did think it strange however that Apple was essentially saying that Intel HD 3000 was better graphics than AMD's offerings. A couple hacks were made. Macs always had a discrete graphics card as well as the built in Intel. A firmware hard was created where you could write a new firmware that turned off the AMD graphics, which mostly worked. The other hack was a hardware hack where you used a heat gun to remove the AMD graphics chip and solder on a jumper wire somewhere. That was for laptops, the desktop towers always had graphics cards, so you could simply remove the AMD card, or replace it with an Nvidia card.

There was a lot of politics involved there too. AMD was pressing Apple to use AMD processors as well, but by this time Apple was working on making their own processors and moving away from X86 architecture entirely.
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Re: Nvidia...yes, NVIDIA announces they're open sourcing their GPU drivers

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Things have happened with both companies over the years. Nvidia had an issue with their gpus in various laptops, HP being the best known as they would slowly slip out of their sockets. Nvidia tried to deny the problems given the heat issues with the GPU and it ended up being settled out of court. AMD IGPs of recent times are far better than Intels IGPs like the 3000. Apple in most of its devices doesnt need a high end GPU and given how small the gaming market is with Apple, its a who cares for both Nvidia and AMD.
Its nice having choices and my hope is once Intel reaches the market with their discrete GPUs we can get lower prices and better performance.
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