Open-Source NVIDIA Outlook Brighter Due To GSP Firmware, But Major Challenges Remain

[Quackdoc]

you do not life in this "reality" because a company who does spend more on support on a hardware than the company earns from the selling of the hardware plain and simple goes bankrupt.

means the alternative to drop the support of the old hardware is not what you like and want you want longer support time but thats not a realistic alternative the only alternative in this reality is to go bankrupt.

in your dreamworld longer support time is a possibility but thats an impossibility.

you need to earn more money for the hardware thats the only way to make longer support time possible and the only company who is able to get more money for the same performance and hardware is nvidia.

you think amd has the possibility to support the hardware longer thats wrong amd only has the possibility of go bankrupt or drop the support.

if AMD goes bankrupt now, it would only have to be because of a vast mismanagement problem, none of my buisness. AMD sales over the past few years have been strong, if they cannot afford to support their hardware despite that, then so be it, I don't need to support them anyways, whether or not they go bankrupt means nothing to me, I simply wont reccomend people buy stuff they will treat as garbage so soon

[qarium]

if AMD goes bankrupt now, it would only have to be because of a vast mismanagement problem, none of my buisness. AMD sales over the past few years have been strong, if they cannot afford to support their hardware despite that, then so be it, I don't need to support them anyways, whether or not they go bankrupt means nothing to me, I simply wont reccomend people buy stuff they will treat as garbage so soon

some companies do in fact go bankrupt because of the lag of money not because of mismanagment.
some companies even with the best management in the world can not survive...

i can tell you this in the time of your rx480/580 and also vega time amd was near bankrupt and had no money what so ever.

"none of my buisness"

right and you know it will become your business as soon as 1 company like intel is left in the market and rise the prices of their cpus because they have no competition.

this means of coure it is your business but you have strong ignorance to ignore relevant facts in your life.

"AMD sales over the past few years have been strong"

the idea that sales matters in quantity in the matter of the support time of the rx480 is complete wrong.
if you sell billion of chips and the price of the product is so low that you do not make profit there will be no money to pay for the support.

"if they cannot afford to support their hardware despite that"

people plain and simple do not use cheap gaming hardware longer than 5 years. in average so this is plain and simple the admiriing the facts.

"I simply wont reccomend people buy stuff they will treat as garbage so soon"

you are free to do so but them you have to suffer from the consequences means higher monopole prices for intel cpus and nvidia gpus...

the joke about going with intel and nvidia is that they of course have longer support times but thats not guaranteed ...
means it could be next year nvidia get a money problem and then cut the support of any hardware older than 4 years.

this means there i no garantee for the future what so ever.

[mdedetrich]

stable firmware ABI ... you know this will never be the case ... !!!

the open source driver developers will spend years on this nvidia opensource driver just to discover that firmware breaks their abi and it is all a waste of time

You do realize that NVidia has been providing drivers against a stable ABI for over a decade (in this case Windows). If your insinuation is that NVidia cannot code against a stable ABI/firmware then you are completely wrong.

Its actually Linux that doesn't have a stable in kernel graphics ABI/API, although that is by design.

[qarium]

You do realize that NVidia has been providing drivers against a stable ABI for over a decade (in this case Windows). If your insinuation is that NVidia cannot code against a stable ABI/firmware then you are completely wrong.

Its actually Linux that doesn't have a stable in kernel graphics ABI/API, although that is by design.

what a joke your writing is... all you said is right but its a complete joke.,.. your proof for the posibility of nvidia code agaist an stable api is windows???

what a joke. yes right it works if we talk about windows but we talk about linux and in the linux world stable ABI does not work...

[mdedetrich]

what a joke your writing is... all you said is right but its a complete joke.,.. your proof for the posibility of nvidia code agaist an stable api is windows???

You do realize that if anything this is providing that NVidia can easily do what you are claiming (at least on the premise that you are insinuating supporting windows is harder, not easier, than Linux)

what a joke. yes right it works if we talk about windows but we talk about linux and in the linux world stable ABI does not work...

Because Linux doesn't fuken provide a stable ABI for their graphics stack, thats a fact. The only stability (with exception of extreme circumstances, i.e. critical security problems) that Linux provides is for userspace via syscalls and you unless you want your driver to be ridiculously slow you don't put it in userspace because of context switching.

[rabcor]

Nvidia's been working kinda slow on getting their driver into the kernel (have they even been working on it at all) I wonder if nouveau won't just beat them to it, still, even if it does, it's a moot point unless the nouveau performance is on par with the proprietary drivers.

On the other hand if the nouveau devs do beat nvidia to it, and they get on par performance with the proprietary drivers, i'd be very happy about it because unlike the official nvidia devs, they aren't bound by the limitations of not being allowed to let the linux driver surpass the windows driver, stupid feature parity bs (wasn't even feature parity, was just "windows performance must be equal or better than linux performance")

[hamishmb]

I'd still use Nouveau if the performance was worse, but I'm not really a gamer. I perosnally value openness above maximum performance, but obviously that's not for everyone.

[qarium]

You do realize that if anything this is providing that NVidia can easily do what you are claiming (at least on the premise that you are insinuating supporting windows is harder, not easier, than Linux)
Because Linux doesn't fuken provide a stable ABI for their graphics stack, thats a fact. The only stability (with exception of extreme circumstances, i.e. critical security problems) that Linux provides is for userspace via syscalls and you unless you want your driver to be ridiculously slow you don't put it in userspace because of context switching.

right ... but this means what nvidia tries to do is a complete joke... there is no stable ABI in linux and they try to do make stable firmware abi... yes what a joke

[mdedetrich]

right ... but this means what nvidia tries to do is a complete joke... there is no stable ABI in linux and they try to do make stable firmware abi... yes what a joke

You should stop moving the goalposts

[pal666]

"NVIDIA will need to commit to a stable GSP firmware ABI" this sounds so strange coming from linux devs considering that proprietary nvndia drivers never worked with newer kernels by default and you had to wait for a new release

you are confusing proprietary with open and kernel with firmware