10 Reasons Linux Gamers Might Want To Pass On The NVIDIA RTX 20 Series

[cj.wijtmans]

Take a hike pal.

[pal666]

with a lot of dropping frames, wayland is worst than X right know and mutter is a nightmare, after years of develop... wayland is only a ilusion

wayland is a protocol. mutter is an implementation and bad one. there are others

[pal666]

1-) Nvidia has the most powerful cards.

but most customers buy most cheap cards, not most powerful cards. so you started with irrelevant point

2-) Nvidia has better ratio for performance per watt or simply performance / price ratio.

it depends on test

3-) For Linux side: Compability of Nvidia's driver is really good while Mesa is not good on that term.

pure bullshit

[pal666]

Can you do gaming with Wayland?

yes. i'm not using nvidia hardware, so nvidia can't forbid me

[pal666]

Wayland is simply unusable for any power user doing more than just mobile browsing bullshit with his PC. I mean, nothing to do with Nvidia, the protocol is too crippled in functionality.

lol. i've accidentally lived in wayland session few weeks without realizing it. i thought that i broke something in vdpau land because vdpau was not working (it's x11 only, but that's not protocol's fault. vpdau is nvidia's stuff btw - see pattern ?)

I'd rather live with X's lack of security than crippled functionality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_pigs

[pal666]

And Sway is a project that shouldn't even exist because such basic features should be in the Wayland protocol itself.

sway is an implementation of protocol. you need implementation no matter what is in protocol

[pal666]

AMD having open drivers and Nvidia closed drivers is irrelevant. YOU shouldn't care about such issue unless you are a kernel or mesa developer.

you should care about your computer working out of the box, your kernel being not tainted and supported by your distro vendor, your randr working, your gpu switching working, your wayland compositor working, your distro release not { postponed because nvidia failed to release binary compatible with latest x.org } and other nice things which you can only have when your driver is open

On the other hand with Nvidia you know that you reuse the codebase and leveragethe maintenance that happens for the windows platform. That is good for YOU and smart for Nvidia.

yes, with nvidia you know that windows shit will be showed down your throat. this is smart for nvidia, but not good for you:
https://www.phoronix.com/forums/foru...29#post1045329

[DavidKL]

As an occasional driver and kernel developer I find a non open register / programming specification totally unacceptable. Back in the day all register level specs where open, or could be obtained easily: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXJ11_wG_0U If all companies from Intel CPUs over all the other graphic chips in between, ARM And PowerPC to name a few would behave like this we may not even have Linux at all, not knowing how to program the Intel CPU, protected mode, chipset i/o, IDE, SATA, NVMe, network chips, etc. Nvidia is on of the worst companies in this regard and as an early and daily Linux user / developer I always boycotted Nvidia wherever I can. Matrox two decades ago, and now obviously ATi/AMD (if not Intel integrated). What has Nvidia to hide? All the hardware implementation bugs and errata? If you are big in Linux vote with your wallet, do not buy proprietary, non-open stuff.

Unfortunately, many will accept the shiny beads in exchange for their land, to speak metaphorically. It seems to me that the big problem with GPUs is the amount of money needed to produce a competitive product these days. It seems to be ancient history, the time when companies like Nvidia and ATI could spring up from nothing and begin to compete in the GPU market. As the complexity increases and the process nodes shrink, the ability for new competitors to come into the market to offer a better value continues to diminish.

What humanity needs is fully-transparent product, no matter what it is. We need to know where our food comes from and how it comes about where it's produced. We need to know what our devices are doing to us, not just "for" us. We need to know what our "representatives" are truly representing.

But, since knowledge is power, knowledge is withheld from us whenever possible. The result is monopolization.

Nvidia has nearly a monopoly in the enthusiast GPU market and the latest rumor is that AMD isn't going to even bother to compete in that market with Navi, instead propping up the Sony/MS "console" duopoly. Well, since consoles now are intentionally below spec standard x86 hardware, there is no reason for their walled gardens to exist, other than the strength of the duopoly market power of Sony and MS, which AMD is rumored to be prepared to further strengthen with Navi. Even without relying on rumors, it's clear enough that Vega was not designed to compete very well in the enthusiast gaming market. It was designed for other purposes, like crypto. AMD was very successful at selling out its entire Vega stock, right after enthusiast gaming sites were overflowing with mockery from gamers for "Vega's failure". It's also possible that AMD simply doesn't have the resources to compete with Nvidia in the enthusiast market anymore, particularly given that it needs to compete in the CPU market. Regardless of the reasons, the result is monopolization by Nvidia, of the quality gaming experience, and duopoly in the "console" space. Gamers and tech enthusiasts lose because of the artificial duplication of product (three x86 gaming gardens), the watering-down of game quality (to make producing a game feasible for three gardens, especially for smaller companies), greater rigidity in the game production market — in favor of large companies (who can afford to spend more time optimizing for both console and "PC"), product value-to-consumer deflation — typically via artificially higher pricing but also via reduced specs — most obviously with the second iteration of the Jaguar processor, and the ability of the monopolies and duopolies to force the product they want to sell onto the consumer (which includes opaque products, rather than those which are transparent — in terms of things like hidden telemetry — as well as transparent anti-consumer features like open spyware).

We need a fully transparent cellular service with accompanying devices. Networking. Chips. There is so much opacity, coupled with consumer-hostile legal agreements, such as arbitration clauses. I just logged into my Yahoo mail account to see a demand that I sign an agreement to give the new owner of the service the ability to give all my data to Verizon as well as settle all disputes via arbitration. Those were just two of the problems with this "agreement".

Once upon a time, the computer user used the computer. The computer was sold to the person so that the person could make use of it. Now, we are used, via the devices, by large corporations. Trojan Horse products are all the rage, and that includes bills like Gramm–Leach–Bliley.

[pal666]

I develop software for a living and I use Linux exclusively simply because it is the best unix like system available. Open source for me is like a gift and an extra.

you seem to be very lousy developer. opensource is the main reason for choosing platform for developer.

If I get my tools to be open source then great but my priorities have higher value for reliability, performance

if you value performance, you already failed. game will usually have better performance on windows, because it was developed on windows and ported to linux with some translation layer. which brings us to the next point

and as a programmer also proper architecture. Nvidia products excel at these values.

since when doing layers of kludges around windows blob is a good architecture? looks like you develop shitty software for a living

When I know that Nvidia can reuse 90% of their code across platforms that they have built with their best developers and battle tested

you can't battle test linux kernel module on windows

[DavidKL]

I wouldn't be surprised if Nvidia is incentivized to keep their Linux experience subpar in order to please MS enough to support whatever things they ask for, like RT support in DX. Much hay has been made of the fact that MS quickly adopted support for RT in DX, unlike its response to AMD's inclusion of the first consumer tessellator.

Linux with Vulcan (and OpenGL for certain uses) has made DX unnecessary, as well as the consoles. A unified x86 software layer to go with the industry-standard unified x86 hardware layer makes sense. It makes very little sense to pay the MS tax and the Sony + MS tax.

All a console is these days is a form factor, a case. ITX has made that irrelevant. There should be more players in the "console" market, since it should simply be x86 hardware with x86 software.

additional thought (edit): It's no surprise for MS to enthusiastically add RT to DX. It is a way to create a technical wedge between the so-called console and the "PC" gaming platform. There is currently nothing technical about the "console" to justify its existence. An ITX PC can do the same thing a so-called console can, especially if the build quality is made for a console-style usage model (i.e. capable of withstanding kids and being easy to use). If PC gaming moves heavily toward ray tracing and consoles don't (for some time), that can be used by Nvidia to justify the high pricing of the "PC" gaming GPUs. RT in DX may also be a way to add distance between DX and Vulkan, to try to justify DX's continued existence.