NVIDIA Looks To Have Some Sort Of Open-Source Driver Announcement For 2020

[starshipeleven]

Wait what? Did they just go faster than light?!

That's the name for some AI-assisted thing of theirs, where the AI will react in your place using your playing history.
Basically, Google wants to track what you do in-game too. Completely and utterly surprising.

[Julien Bear]

The Nouveau Developers should just switch the sides and help AMD improve their drivers. There is no need to be an unpaid slave and getting feces of Nvidia into the face.
Nvidia didn't appriciate your effort and recommended the framebuffer driver and you should listen to them and just stop the work. At least we, the users, appriciate your work but now it is time to work for something which has an real impact with AMDVLK and Stadia. This news just wants to lure you back into the hamster wheel and Nvidia is watching you with a grin because you are not more then a toy to them. Thank you.

[johannesburgel]

Jensen Huang talked at a Mellanox event two weeks ago (NVIDIA is buying Mellanox). He made an effort to ensure everybody that all the Mellanox drivers and tools/libraries would stay Opwn Source, that he understood the power of Open Source and they would do great things in the future.

It sounded genuine. Probably with AMD attacking NVIDIA in the HPC world now (Frontier Supercomputer), Intel going to build high-performance GPUs and the importance of Open Source in many fields he finally understood that NVIDIA had to change at least something.

[JPFSanders]

Wait what? Did they just go faster than light?!

Dude, absolutely, it is all in the laws of physics, don't you know that the only thing faster than light is bullshit?

[JPFSanders]

Dear NVIDIA, we're happy with AMD now, all the best, hug and kisses.

[MadeUpName]

is CUDA only used for workstation professional work? its not a gaming thing from what I can tell.

It is the compute functionality so their alternative to openCL. It gets used for all kinds of things from spreadsheets to engineering and I thinks some games. My interest would be photo and movie editing. Which reminds me video encode needs to work as well.

[mdedetrich]

In March? Why not let the world know now? Are they worried this top secret information will be used by their competitors against them to gain an edge? haha XD

So bloody secretive... Either they are a bunch of immature kids or they are criminals. My guess is a mix of both.

The main reason that NVidia has been beating AMD when it comes to desktop gaming on Windows is the huge amount of hacks that NVidia has embedded into the binary blob to make games run at full performance (or at all). Due to the way games are developed (crunch time) most games (even AAA ones) are built in substandard ways, at best they are subperformant and at worse they are non compliant. The NVidia drivers does hot patching based on detecting the game executable that is run to make games work properly and/or faster. This is also the reason behind NVidia's 0-day driver releases.

The above is the secret sauce that NVidia doesn't want to release. This problem is also whats being solved by the Vulkan API, the reason why NVidia is able to do all of these hotpatched performance improvements is due to the fact that both OpenGL and DirectX are very high level API's which means its quite difficult to optimize them properly because its abstracted away (also doing multithreaded GPU work in those API's is terrible).

Note that linux is also experiencing the same problems in their Vulkan -> OpenGL/DirectX translation libraries, they are also know finding out that they have to maintain a library of hacks to make specific games work (i.e. developer releases a game and forgets to clear the OpenGL frame so the hack forcefully clears it for you).

[johannesburgel]

It is the compute functionality so their alternative to openCL. It gets used for all kinds of things from spreadsheets to engineering and I thinks some games. My interest would be photo and movie editing. Which reminds me video encode needs to work as well.

NVIDIA drivers support OpenCL 2.0 and Vulkan Compute just fine. There is not really any reason to bother with CUDA anymore. darktable has OpenCL support and it worked just fine on on my GTX 950.

[Djhg2000]

NVIDIA drivers support OpenCL 2.0 and Vulkan Compute just fine. There is not really any reason to bother with CUDA anymore. darktable has OpenCL support and it worked just fine on on my GTX 950.

The engineering side of CUDA is getting fed up with NVIDIA as well. I've heard of at least one simulation suite where the lead developer wants to switch to OpenCL. NVIDIA knows they can keep asking huge amounts of money for GPU instructions only enabled on Quadro cards, and since the code is written for CUDA already there's no reason for NVIDIA to keep playing ball with development help.

I don't think a large part of NVIDIA realizes they've made the exact same mistake as 3dfx made all these years ago. So now they've either woken up and realized that proprietary APIs inevitably are a dead end, or it's another batch of marketing material to justify changing effectively nothing.

[JPFSanders]

it's another batch of marketing material to justify changing effectively nothing.

I think you're onto something here.

NVIDIA is the type of company that will go down in flames before changing anything, in their eyes they're winning, why change?.