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

[zexelon]

Yes I use Nvidia every day across my desktop and server platforms... that being said I looked up the Digits platform that Dirk Van Gelder championed (among others)... their Github repo for it has not been touched in over 2 years and the last release they publish is from 2017!

While I fully support Nvidia's right to build proprietary software, faking open source is just pointless, especially since by its very nature open source is open for everyone to see if your faking it!

[oiaohm]

But, as already pointed out, that's not my point and you can safely skip that explanation, because I was referring to NVidia claims about their open source efforts for gamers and end users (linux): they obviously care to keep also those users somewhat hopeful if not 100% happy, and that alone shows those users are not irrelevant, not even to NVidia.

Except the problem is it really does not. Releasing documentation of stuff that has mostly been reversed already did not change stuff much so was more hey we are doing the right thing by in fact doing nothing useful.

The main issue with Nvidia cards is lack of power management firmware for open source drivers. Modern Nvidia cards this is signed so you cannot go and write your own. With out this firmware you cannot clock up the GPU. Worse the Nvidia GPU for 3d acceleration can in fact be unstable as well as slow. Yes some of those reversing are extracting the signed nvidia firmware out the Nvidia drivers of course using this is not legal in all countries.

By the way when the power management firmware was not signed open source drivers writers in fact wrote their own and got more performance out the Nvidia cards than Nvidia wanted so ruining back then some of Nvidia market segmentation of course as soon as that happened Nvidia implemented signed firmware next generation.

The big thing that is needed is Nvidia to release the signed init firmware for their cards as firmware files separate to drivers under a license that can be distributed. Yes doing this will see some of Nvidia badly implemented market segmentation go by by.