I still don't understand why NVIDIA refuses to share the power management/clocking firmware, its not like sharing that firmware is going to give their competitors any secret information about the secrets of NVIDIA GPUs that said competitors don't already have. If anything, it would probably result in people buying NVIDIA cards who would otherwise have not bought those cards (i.e. increased sales)
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NVIDIA Publishes Signed Ampere Firmware To Finally Allow Accelerated Open-Source Support
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Originally posted by jonwil View PostI still don't understand why NVIDIA refuses to share the power management/clocking firmware, its not like sharing that firmware is going to give their competitors any secret information about the secrets of NVIDIA GPUs that said competitors don't already have. If anything, it would probably result in people buying NVIDIA cards who would otherwise have not bought those cards (i.e. increased sales)
With things the way things are, nvidia's GPUs function just well enough (at the reduced clock speeds) with the in-kernel driver that the computer can generate usable video. This allows the user to go download and install nvidia's binary driver.
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Originally posted by Developer12 View PostThey need people to prefer the binary driver over the open source one, because it's through their binary driver they enforce certain terms of use, product segmentation, DRM, etc.
The company features can still be secured by obscurity.
You can't make a card faster and get more ram and cores by flashing different firmware
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Originally posted by bemerk View PostCUDA.
What things are so critical that you can't go the AMD way and do most things people need in the open?
Originally posted by bemerk View PostYou don't have to have feature parity between the binary driver and an open source one.
Originally posted by bemerk View PostYou can't make a card faster ... by flashing different firmware
Originally posted by bemerk View PostThe company features can still be secured by obscurity.
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Originally posted by sinepgib View Post
It depends. If the current firmware is used to lock features out, a different firmware may re-enable it. AFAIK they do that with miner cards.
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Originally posted by Developer12 View PostThere's no obscurity here. The clock speed can only be changed by firmware. The card will only accept firmware signed by nvidia. The firmware nvidia has signed doesn't support changing the clock speed.
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Originally posted by ssokolow View Post
Technically, there is obscurity in that, if they wanted to get into an arms race with nVidia, the Nouveau developers could try to maintain a tool for extracting the firmware from the binary driver and then fake being the binary driver... it's just not exactly practical when nVidia could scramble things up differently with every point release and make it legally unfeasible to keep and distribute copies of the drivers versions you know how to extract from.
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Originally posted by Developer12 View Post
They can also simply make it illegal to use their firmware with anything but their own driver. They have 100% control to set whatever terms they wish in their firmware licence.
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