ASUS Releases Graphics Card That Could Actually Be Great For Open-Source NVIDIA Fans

[kylew77]

Was thinking this might be a cool GPU for testing out bare metal *BSD systems since FreeBSD is the only BSD with official Nvidia support and AMDGPU lags behind on the *BSDs. I honestly don't know what AMD GPUs are supported on a given BSD at a given time. Unfortunately I don't think OpenBSD even supports the open source Nvidia driver so this is a no go there. NetBSD does so this might be a cool GPU if building a NetBSD box.

[aht0]

Multi-GPU gaming is dead and there's no game where a Threadripper would offer any advantage over a fast 6 or 8 core Ryzen. But I guess it's like with expensive cars, you'll always find someone with the money to buy it anyway..

Do me a favor. When you are not active gamers, do not try to second guess or play smartass. There may be factors in play, which makes choices made logical, despite whatever you may think. When all you do is playing Tetris or Bomberman on linux, yeah, potato is enough to run your games, off iGPU. Same with some few multiplayer games that actually run on Linux, like CSGO. It's not precisely resource hungry.

There are some games that support mGPU just fine. Besides, you may not know where raytracing and VR may lead. Maybe mGPU is more relevant in future. And keep in mind mGPU in DX12 is not same as SLI/CrossFire. Present moment it's useful in select amount of games and for content creators. Latter of which are many btw. Former of which, some games supporting mGPU are quite popular, Gears Of War 4 for example - if you play that, you can use mGPU and have built your rigs accordingly.

Why would you need heavy-duty CPU? Streaming and content creation has become kind of thing. To get good quality, high fps video on high resolution (1440p or 4k) video takes lots of horsepower. Thus Threadripper. When you are happy with Full HDMI or 720p you can use some capture card setup or old i5 in dedicated box. Having one machine that can at once compress/encode and play is easier, long-term maybe also cheaper. Besides, games are becoming more and more multithreaded, quite a lot can take 16 threads and run with them, giving back linear performance upscale.

Realtime encoding is also needed in cases you need to record events during gameplay, for example: some asshole would cause grief, like cheater. You can choose to record precise event after it has happened (Replay function in OBS Studio for example), upload it to YT, send the link to an admin and be rid of him minutes later. On a rig that is barely good for playing the game itself, keeping live recording "just in case" up would drastically reduce performance. When you have more CPU power than you generally need, it does not impact your gaming experience whatever you have running on background. It's better and quicker than recording uncompressed video and trashing your HDD/SSD with multigigabyte/per min. video's, then editing out relevant pieces manually, compressing same, uploading and so forth.

[aht0]

Was thinking this might be a cool GPU for testing out bare metal *BSD systems since FreeBSD is the only BSD with official Nvidia support and AMDGPU lags behind on the *BSDs. I honestly don't know what AMD GPUs are supported on a given BSD at a given time.

Up to and including Vega's I think. Vega's anyway work. On FreeBSD. Look at development driver, it's ported off Linux 5.0 code. non-devel driver is ported from 4.16 but didn't work for me (screen turned black and remained so. Same on some Linux distros that were running off 4.x kernels)

[fagzal]

With all the open source AMD love, let's not forget that AMD cards are very inefficient. Power consumption, heat and noise is a real thing, people

[phoron]

That's a stupid idea... and you can quote me on that. I've heard of people doing stuff like that it and it just makes your employees hate you. If you have the money to hire someone you should also have the money to buy them a $500 PC at least else you are running a sweat shop.

Well, I don't want to mislead anyone, I haven't actually tried. I just said it because in general I find that there are low GPU usage use cases where more monitors can be useful, and people don't need lots of 3D acceleration or CPU performance. And there are some SBCs with smaller PCIe slots, so it looked like this card could make some things possible that weren't before.

Some friends of mine for example found a RockPro64 with debian good enough (and cheap) for their browsing. banking and accounting needs. And they have to purposely stress it for even the fan to turn on. They didn't care to install a PCI SATA adapter and SSDs.They could have been happier with a couple monitors (to see more spreadsheet data at once, for instance).

Remember a Arock A300W + CPU + ram/ssd is about $300... maybe less if you skimp.

Possibly. But that is too many blobs for me to recommend. I only hope that the ASUS card works without blobs. As I said I don't know it for sure.

[zoomblab]

Proprietary firmware is good and you want it. Because it is supported by the manufacturer. Who are responsible for the design of the whole damn thing and actualy know what they are doing. It is also less software for the rest of us to maintain. If it makes your open source carma feel better you can think of it as part of the hardware.

[phoron]

Proprietary firmware is good and you want it. Because it is supported by the manufacturer. Who are responsible for the design of the whole damn thing and actualy know what they are doing. It is also less software for the rest of us to maintain. If it makes your open source carma feel better you can think of it as part of the hardware.

Sorry, but I can't believe a single word in this particular post. At least you're brief and to the point.

Unknowable code is never good.

You have no idea of want I want.

Firmware is not supported because the manufacturer benefits from hardware sales, not firmware support.

The responsability and knowledge of manufacturers varies wildly, with frustrating averages. When they are capable, they
may have interests contrary to their customers.

Nobody has to maintain nobody else's stuff. I'm grateful that they do but I don't deceive myself thinking they must.
I just aim for we collectively being able to, not being sure to do it, that's why I want freedom.

Loadable firmware can't be thought as hardware because it can be cheaply, unwastefully replaced, unlike hardware. The fact that not everyone is able to write replacements does not make it hardware any more that Windows is hardware.

But if it makes you feel better you can believe in whatever deities, metaphysical misteries, invisible hands or benevolent corporations you like. I don't recommend it, but I wouldn't stop anyone doing it even if I could.

[horizonbrave]

Totally OT: please what's the successor of the RX 570 for a laptop AMD graphic card?
Thanks!

[duby229]

Sorry, but I can't believe a single word in this particular post. At least you're brief and to the point.

Unknowable code is never good.

You have no idea of want I want.

Firmware is not supported because the manufacturer benefits from hardware sales, not firmware support.

The responsability and knowledge of manufacturers varies wildly, with frustrating averages. When they are capable, they
may have interests contrary to their customers.

Nobody has to maintain nobody else's stuff. I'm grateful that they do but I don't deceive myself thinking they must.
I just aim for we collectively being able to, not being sure to do it, that's why I want freedom.

Loadable firmware can't be thought as hardware because it can be cheaply, unwastefully replaced, unlike hardware. The fact that not everyone is able to write replacements does not make it hardware any more that Windows is hardware.

But if it makes you feel better you can believe in whatever deities, metaphysical misteries, invisible hands or benevolent corporations you like. I don't recommend it, but I wouldn't stop anyone doing it even if I could.

You do realize that even this card has proprietary firmware right? Only difference is that this card loads its proprietary firmware from a rom and other hardware loads its proprietary firmware from the driver. THIS CARD STILL HAS JUST AS MUCH FIRMWARE AS ANY OTHER GPU

[phoron]

You do realize that even this card has proprietary firmware right? Only difference is that this card loads its proprietary firmware from a rom and other hardware loads its proprietary firmware from the driver. THIS CARD STILL HAS JUST AS MUCH FIRMWARE AS ANY OTHER GPU

Thank you, I do realise. And I don't like it. And I even said before I'm suspicious it could even additionally require ROM BIOS code to be run in the main CPU instead of the chips in the card itself (in my view that would be more ROM driver code than ROM firmware, but that's splitting hair). I didn't mean to say any proprietary code is good. I would like that code to be published under a free license and modifiable and installable by the hardware owner. And I would also like the hardware schematics and all documentation be realeased under free licenses, and so on. I didn't mean to say this card is ideal, sorry if I came across so. I was more trying to argue against the notion that loadable proprietary firmware is good than defending that unloadable proprietary firmware is good.

I do think anyway, now that we come to that, that unloadable proprietary firmware is a lesser evil than loadable proprietary firmware, because it at least leaves everybody with equal possibilities to change it. And I accept the RYF/FSF/others notion than it is roughly equivalent to hardware. Because hardware is just wares that are hard to change and software is wares that are easier to change. ROM firmware can have problems and the circuitry itself can have problems. Buying closed hardware is a risk, buying open hardware is a smaller risk, but the difference is not quite like with proprietary software and free software.

I have written in other threads about it in the past, so I hesitate to bore the people again here, but if you're interested just tell me, and I can extend it a little more. I don't think today, but maybe tomorrow or some day.