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Mumblings Of A "Big New" Open-Source GPU Driver Coming...

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  • #91
    Even if it's nVidia, I will remain loyal to AMD for the foreseeable future due to their loyalty to our platform over the past 15 years or so.

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    • #92
      Originally posted by Lanz View Post
      Even if it's nVidia, I will remain loyal to AMD for the foreseeable future due to their loyalty to our platform over the past 15 years or so.
      What BS are you talking about?

      Nvidia has provided proper drivers for Linux longer than ATI had been churning out their assbackwords horrible fglrx driver.

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      • #93
        Originally posted by SilverBird775 View Post
        Yep, my thought too. Huawei going open source would be indeed a "Big New"s. They have lot's of Mali GPU's and counting. Imagine the burden growing. Meantime Russia is lame. Can't be anything from MCST since Vivante already opensourced and their homegrown 2D accelerator MGA2 do hardly have any importance or even heard of. Baikal-M CPU have Mali-T628 build in, but this CPU was produced in pieces for a glossy paper. NVidia? Yeeeah Funny!

        So I guess news from China.
        Are you aware that Elbrus 2k 6 gen will be launched the end of this year,or the beginning of the next one?
        yes there are some configurations that will indeed use Imagination Technologies graphics

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        • #94
          Originally posted by Nocifer View Post
          You should probably learn to make a distinction between hoping and needing.
          The most important distinction to make in such topic is the distinction between [i]hoping|/i] and guessing. I can personally hope for Nvidia mainlining free open source drivers, but I can't guess for now that is Nvidia that is mainlining free open source drivers. Hope is useless in that thread. We all know we all want Nvidia to have performant free open source drivers, but neither that need, neither that hope has any power on the Nvidia decision… If some company, including Nvidia, opens his drivers, this is not because our need neither our hope, so neither need and hope can be significant to guess the company name…

          For the guess going to Nvidia, we know this:But on the other hand, more than ever they rely on the closeness of their proprietary driver. Nvidia is promising Windows gamers that miners won't be able to use the Nvidia gaming GPUs to do mining on Linux, promising the closed source driver will artificially block those usages. Publishing an open source driver right now would completely destroy this strategy. And because they got some hate, even from games, for doing this, it would have been stupid for them to take the risk for such hate while knowing they would themselves defeat their own strategy three months later… Or they would have to be able to do such nasty things outside the free open source driver, like in some signed firmware. So in the end, we would have free open source drivers that would not be able to work properly with some signed things from Nvidia, and the official Nvidia open source drivers would not be better than Nouveau without their blessed unlocker…

          Another thing that raises questions is the investment of Red Hat in making Nouveau OpenCL a thing, instead of helping to finish the only last bit were AMD doesn't shine yet. I guess Nvidia has interest in seeing Linux users buying Nvidia hardware to be used with free open source nouveau than buying an AMD, (even if their Nvidia proprietary driver would lose that war):
          Anyway, Nvidia is 10 years late compared to AMD in regard of Linux integration. Even if some announce of free open source Nvidia drivers happen, don't hold your breath, and don't buy an Nvidia in hope for what is still a dream (for those who are likely to dream about Nvidia to begin with, eh).

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          • #95
            Originally posted by Sonadow View Post
            What BS are you talking about?

            Nvidia has provided proper drivers for Linux longer than ATI had been churning out their assbackwords horrible fglrx driver.
            I would not call ”proper drivers” something games must write dedicated workarounds for:


            AMD/ATI started to open documentation and to work on open drivers around 2008 or even a bit earlier (ATI was acquired by AMD in 2006), what I remember is that already in 2008 my ATI GPU was supported by the free driver (radeonhd at the time) before the proprietary driver… At the time it was rough, but it only got better since this time. 2008 was 13 years ago. Also you seem to miss that fglrx is abandoned since 2015 or so. Even Ubuntu Xenial from 2016 can't run it… 2015 is 6 years ago. Also the ATI brand is not used since 2010, that's 11 years ago.

            In which cave do you live? Nvidia is multiple decade late in the game. If I had to build-up catchwords for Nvidia I would suggest “Nvidia: doing graphics like year 2000, faster”. Yes, their chips are on par with today needs, but on Linux integration they are multiple decade late, and on the other hand AMD chips are also on par with today needs, but with more than a decade of proper integration in the ecosystem.

            The fact you need to quote fglrx to put Nvidia above AMD as your best argument just shows how bad such position is to be defended. Some AMD consumers may even don't know what the fglrx word means and that it even existed…

            I bought my last brand new Nvidia around 2006, because at the time both ATI and Nvidia drivers were proprietary and Nvidia one was in better shape. But this was 15 years ago, and I will not chose what GPU brand to buy today because of the shape of the 2006 market… That would be silly.

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            • #96
              When Vetter said the new driver is "big", I don't think he meant it's "big news" or even that it's from a "big vendor". Based on his meme, I think he just meant the driver is bloated and contains too many lines of code - it's a "big driver" in a technical sense but may not be exciting when revealed.

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              • #97

                Meh, rumors...

                Not news.

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                • #98
                  Originally posted by Danny3 View Post
                  I have decided to spend my hard earned money only on devices whose manufactures respect me as a customer like Intel [...]
                  Not sure I'd ever use Intel in that sort of context. Short of being nicer about Open Source, they're just as bad as NVIDIA, if not worse.

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                  • #99
                    How about having Gigabyte or Asus run a full linux on their mainboards instead?
                    There is so much work on a making the uefi/bios firmwares smaller , manufacturer independent and more secure

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                    • The obvious guess would be Nvidia, but considering they've had no issues whatsoever retaining a high market share with their proprietary model I highly doubt it's them. There's also the fact that they've got their single big kernel space binary blob that they share between Windows, Linux, Android, BSD and Switch (which runs a FreeBSD derivative they helped develop) and moving to a DRM-based affair would cause them to have to bifurcate their driver development. Something they've very deliberately tried to avoid with that "one-binary-blob-to-rule-them-all" of theirs.

                      After that there's Imagination Technologies with their PowerVR series which fits the bill in terms of being cantankerous with open source, but it's definitely seen better days in terms of market share and thus doesn't fit the "major" bill. Hence my guess would be that it's either Qualcomm with their "Adreno" series or ARM with their Mali series, both of which have been less than stellar when it comes to open source support. Of those two I'd say the most likely candidate is Qualcomm as their mobile graphics division used to be AMD's mobile graphics division ("Adreno" is literally "Radeon" with the letters re-arranged) and they still share enough technological similarities that they can probably use a lot of the AMDGPU codebase.

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