Don't Expect An Open-Source NVIDIA Vulkan Driver Anytime Soon

[nomadewolf]

If you would look past "AMD is our saviour, Nvidia is evil", you'd see I said mostly the same thing. AMD is open source friendly, but they still don't have open source Vulkan, thus expecting open source Vulkan for Nvidia is downright unrealistic at this time.

I only have two computers, which are laptops and they both boast intel processor and nvidia graphics.
Therefore, while i do aplaud and love AMD's support off the the open source graphics, and also prefer to buy and reccomend AMD (when i think its justifiable), i don't think i am that biased towards AMD...

[schmidtbag]

Even so, with AMD having more documentation out, it is expecting they'll get there first, right?

Yeah, probably.

I agree with your assessment of Vulkan titles, but I cannot help to notice Linux is about to miss the opportunity of presenting itself as a Vulkan ready platform. With support in place, maybe more developers would be inclined to see how easy/hard it is to make their games run on Linux. Though closed source support may fill that gap quite nicely, too.

I understand your point; it is one I considered. But AMD does have a closed-source Vulkan option, I believe Nvidia does too, and nobody expects to play cutting-edge demanding games on Intel. That being said, most game devs tend to only support closed-source drivers. As long as AMD and Nvidia officially offer Vulkan to some degree, that ought to be enough.

[bridgman]

Because as far as I understand, there's already an official AMD Vulkan driver, just not an open source one. To my knowledge, AMD is not working on an open-source one, so obviously they won't have a release date for it.

We are not working on a separate open source Vulkan driver, but we are working on opening up the currently-closed-source Vulkan driver.

[darkbasic]

Why do people keep buying Nvidia

[DanL]

There isn't a set date for AMD open source Vulkan driver yet, so why would anyone be expecting one for Nvidia?

It's still fair to wonder if anyone has started work on an open-source nvidia Vulkan driver (even in a private branch), or whether the current nouveau devs are willing to work on one concurrently with their current OpenGL work.

[tegs]

Fuck you Nvidia. Again.

[bug77]

Why do people keep buying Nvidia

Because it works. But that's far more than some people can imagine, I reckon.

[fuzz]

Because it works. But that's far more than some people can imagine, I reckon.

But open source drivers work even better...

[artivision]

Why do people keep buying Nvidia

1. Because it worked before and now they afraid to do the change. AMD's slow development speed is the reason for that.
2. Because they thing that WineHQ and Gallium Nine isn't native. That has something to do with drugs.

[schmidtbag]

Why do people keep buying Nvidia

Most people run Windows. Most Windows users prefer Nvidia because they overall perform better. When people switch to Linux (or dual boot with it), they bring their hardware with them.

Also as stated in other topics, most Linux users don't care if the drivers are open source; they just want something that works. The closed-source nvidia drivers, though far from perfect, work well enough and get the most attention by game devs.