NVIDIA's Director of Software Development Talks Up Open-Source

[ix900]

All the anti-Nvidia peeps pop out lol.

[rmfx]

It is like Apple conference about making products at a fair price: you read the title twice.

[cjcox]

Something inside of me wants to totally ignore "the new hire" and have him give his presentation after working for Nvidia for 5 years or so. Just saying.

[Volta]

All the anti-Nvidia peeps pop out lol.

Rather anti-bullshit, because their cheap talk started to be boring.

[Ipkh]

I'm not sure what is going on with the old Linus quote. Pretty sure that was referring to the tegra soc back in the day. Maybe the kernel can just refuse to use proprietary modules altogether? Surely implementation of 3rd party modules should be blocked altogether. But I guess that doesn't leave much hardware support as the completely open debian distribution shows.
AMD makes great CPUs but has yet to solidly support their GPUs despite using the same basic architecture for a decade.

[r1348]

The middle finger still stands.

[birdie]

Intel and AMD both release docs and work on the open source drivers.

NVIDIA? Talks about how nice to open source they are, while pooling its efforts into inventing new ways (GPL condoms) to try and dodge Linux's license obligations.

God, so much pain in this comment. So much sorrow. Do you even sleep at night or the thought of NVIDIA misusing your celestial pure OS keeps you up? Has it ever crossed your mind that NVIDIA owes Linux, the open source movement and you exactly nothing and that they are a commercial company driven by profits, not by pleasing Open Source no-ones in the comments section? If NVIDIA realizes that open sourcing a large stack of their software will net them even more profits, they'll do that in an instant. Meanwhile please kindly bugger off. Or better yet create a successful multibillion business which serves literally the entire planet Earth (year, NVIDIA GPUs are used for rendering movies which most people of the Earth watch. NVIDIA GPUs are also extensively used by ... scientists who are also searching for new drugs).

The self-entitlement of Open Source fans truly has no boundaries. It's cringe worthy and pathetic. Mostly the latter.

NVidia definitely has interesting tech. But seriously, especially these days it makes no sense to develop hardware without open source drivers. Every developer out there knows the pain of dealing with that. Hope they'll realize soon (aka, NOW) how stupidly wrong their strategy is and move quickly to an open source model for their drivers.

I've been using NVIDIA binary drivers since the late 90s and I cannot quite share your sentiment. It's half-assed, sorry. NVIDIA drivers and products are great and a joy to use. AMD has open source Linux drivers and along with them a huge number of issues.

LoL. NVIDIA is not a vendor of mine, and will not be as long as they are abusive and snooty about everything.

Linux on the desktop does not exist, yes, I'm saying it while writing this comment on a PC running Fedora 32. Try to remind yourself from time to time.

Meanwhile, NVIDIA GeForce GPUs Gain Major Market Share Versus AMD Radeon in Q2 2020, Hits 80% Market Share In The Discrete Segment

So much for poor Phoronix, r/Linux fans who deem themselves the center of the world.

[Danny3]

Nvidia is dead and buried for me.
Even if they would open source their driver today, I would still not move from AMD and Intel.
Treating their customers like garbage is not easily forgivable.
Anyway, congrats to AMD and Intel!

[bug77]

NVidia definitely has interesting tech. But seriously, especially these days it makes no sense to develop hardware without open source drivers. Every developer out there knows the pain of dealing with that. Hope they'll realize soon (aka, NOW) how stupidly wrong their strategy is and move quickly to an open source model for their drivers.

It's kinda hard to realize "how stupidly wrong" a strategy that put in position to buy ARM (not that they will, but they can) is. Just sayin'.

[Guest]

NVidia definitely has interesting tech. But seriously, especially these days it makes no sense to develop hardware without open source drivers. Every developer out there knows the pain of dealing with that. Hope they'll realize soon (aka, NOW) how stupidly wrong their strategy is and move quickly to an open source model for their drivers.

Let's say NVIDIA open-sourced their drivers tomorrow. What actually happens? Their driver already largely works great, and it seems like most reproducible issues reported on their dev forum gets fixed. Optimus on laptops might eventually work better, but it already seems like it's in a good place with Turing and newer with the dynamic power-off thing. If their strategy was actually wrong, they wouldn't have the GPU sales, reputation, and support (CUDA, etc) they have.

I've only really dealt with NVIDIA by Optimus on laptops since Skylake, up to Coffee Lake. Aside from the dynamic power thing (basically dGPU running always), the driver worked fine for me as an end-user.

Meanwhile, I've had uncountable issues in the past leading to complete system lock-ups on both AMD and Intel open-source drivers. The issues were normally with gaming, but there was months a while back where I couldn't watch videos on a HD7850 on Linux without a random system freeze. And earlier this year on a Coffee Lake laptop (UHD 630), I had i915 also straight up cause system freezes with general web browsing and desktop usage (GNOME) on Fedora 31 or 32; apparently there was a big mess with a kernel update upstream.

And albeit largely unrelated, even on Windows, both AMD and Intel aren't as-ideal as NVIDIA. Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling on AMD only works on two of their newest GPUs (and is in some quiet beta), whereas it's all of Pascal and above on NVIDIA, and nothing at all on Intel unless you're on an Insider release and not even 2004/latest. AMD's graphics driver is also the most bloated mess I've seen yet; I don't need a hardware advisor, streaming support, overlay, account links, phone streaming, or VR streaming, and yet all of that gets installed, forcibly without choice at install time. And funny enough, most of the same bs gets installed as well with AMD's Enterprise (professional) driver; it's like that mess with Candy Crush and Xbox apps being pre-installed on Enterprise editions of W10. Meanwhile, the worst I get with NVIDIA's graphics driver is an option to install GeForce Experience, that I can easily decline at install time.