Fedora Project Leader Calls Out NVIDIA Over Their Proprietary Linux Drivers

[birdie]

K. Cool take. Maybe next time instead of rabidly typing accusatory comments, get some facts to back up your claims.
eBay v. Newmark is the case law that can potentially put Nvidia at risk of being sued by their shareholders (among others). Yes, they can mitigate that by creating their own internal policy (Similar to google's "Do no evil") but they are incentivized by the law to do so.
Also anyone who ever made super-mario with ray tracing in Unity can tell you how to the nvidia game-ready drivers work on a general level.

I would love to see:

1) game related network dumps of systems with NVIDIA drivers sending information to NVIDIA servers
2) systems being "reconfigured" to run games faster under NVIDIA drivers
3) I presume you've seen the source code of closed source AMD/Intel drivers and they do not that do that, right? Please prove that as well. And no way they cannot copy this behavior, it must be patented, right? Show me the patents please.

The original comment was a load of complete and utter BS. No links, no proofs, nothing. Maybe I should sue you first for false statements. You really have something wild going on in your head.

[RahulSundaram]

Please point me at my messages and exact sentences which your believe are inflammatory. Let's talk about it in the first person, not behind my back.

The example is within the message itself here. This is a public forum where everyone is fully aware that we can see each other messages yet you say this is "behind your back". This is unnecessarily inflammatory. It is a common justification from people who did this to claim, "I am just being straightforward" but I think you are aware of your actions and could certainly changes your tone and acknowledge your actions and nuances in any topic if you wanted to.

[clockwork]

I would love to see:

1) game related network dumps of systems with NVIDIA drivers sending information to NVIDIA servers
2) systems being "reconfigured" to run games faster under NVIDIA drivers
3) I presume you've seen the source code of closed source AMD/Intel drivers and they do not that do that, right? Please prove that as well. And no way they cannot copy this behavior, it must be patented, right? Show me the patents please.

The original comment was a load of complete and utter BS. No links, no proofs, nothing. Maybe I should sue you first for false statements. You really have something wild going on in your head.

1) And here you demonstrate your absolute lack of knowledge on this subject. Game-ready drivers are updated for every major Title. When Game ready drivers get released for a game, they are often accompanied by huge FPS boosts on that same hardware. Meaning that Nvidia particularly adjusted their drivers to work better with that title.
2) Or you could just roll back your driver and notice the performance loss for a pre game-release driver. Seriously, you clearly have no clue what you're talking about. Any user who downloads Windows drivers can see in nice pretty pictures which game they are updating the drivers for.
3) Or I can just deduce that since AMD and Intel DON'T release curated drivers for each major title, they probably can't do that.

This is all pretty common understanding among anyone who used the Windows Nvidia drivers. Understanding which you clearly lack. I made no false statements.

[White Wolf]

So in polite way he said this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_36yNWw_07g

[sabian2008]

I have to confess I expected something with more quality in its arguments from a RH developer, as RH is a very pragmatic company (and that's how they've created a business around FOSS). He basically repeated things known to everyone. But it is okay for him to vent.

I also have to acknowledge that when the Linux situation of the nVidia driver is discussed, birdie ends up being almost on the reasonable side as inflammatory and disrespectful as he tends to be.

nVidia has a business model. Changes to the driver situation are going to happen when a more profitable business model is presented to nVidia that benefits from a FOSS driver. It has to bee an all costs included model, such as technology for which nVidia doesn't hold patents and open sourcing them would mean paying a lot of money or replacing them. AMD went through that change. It was not out of solidarity that AMD created its open source driver, but out of a better business model compatible with it.

Wishful thinking like "nVidia should disappear from the face of the Earth" is not going to get anybody anywhere. There's a lot of people that earn money with nVidia cards and won't stop doing that because of your moral high stand. Luckily, AMD is catching up with compute capabilities and is consistently winning most of the contracts for top supercomputers. That might force nVidia to reevaluate its position way more than any empty complaint. Linus on the other hand, has every right to say "F$ck you" to nVidia, as he is the one putting the work of dealing with the problem. Same way as he said something similar about Intel and AVX-512.

[birdie]

The example is within the message itself here. This is a public forum where everyone is fully aware that we can see each other messages yet you say this is "behind your back". This is unnecessarily inflammatory. It is a common justification from people who did this to claim, "I am just being straightforward" but I think you are aware of your actions and could certainly changes your tone and acknowledge your actions and nuances in any topic if you wanted to.

I'm not going to be nuanced with people

• who say "F you NVIDIA" under all news pieces about NVIDIA. Nothing about this looks even remotely "subtle". Isn't it amazing that I'm a rare person here who operates with facts and solid logic while many other express raw emotions in the meanest way possible and I'm the one who has to be subtle? Like really?? You're sure?
• who believe the world owes them because they've chosen a particular OS.
• most of whom have done exactly nothing for open source. Not even a single stupid bug report.
• most of whom pretend Linux is an OS. It's not. Never has been. It's thousands of incompatible distros.

I've long stopped calling people rabid fanatics and plain idiots. I now only address what they say - looks like, according to you, I should wrap my thoughts in a wall of text to be "polite" and "nuanced". I see nothing positive about that. I want to deliver my thoughts directly

Again, I've asked you directly about what you believe is "inflammatory" - you can't even answer the question instead you're teaching me how to behave and talking about my character traits which is nothing but ad hominem.

Level with me, tell me, "Artem, this looks mean and vile and you're completely wrong" - this would be great. In the other thread I already openly admitted I'd made a mistake, I'm fine with that. Never seen anyone else here admitting they were wrong.

[RahulSundaram]

Again, I've asked you directly about what you believe is "inflammatory" - you can't even answer the question instead you're teaching me how to behave and talking about my character traits which is nothing but ad hominem

You are doing it again, you posted a large wall of text and ignored the example I gave you. Did you miss it?

[birdie]

1) And here you demonstrate your absolute lack of knowledge on this subject. Game-ready drivers are updated for every major Title. When Game ready drivers get released for a game, they are often accompanied by huge FPS boosts on that same hardware. Meaning that Nvidia particularly adjusted their drivers to work better with that title.
2) Or you could just roll back your driver and notice the performance loss for a pre game-release driver. Seriously, you clearly have no clue what you're talking about. Any user who downloads Windows drivers can see in nice pretty pictures which game they are updating the drivers for.
3) Or I can just deduce that since AMD and Intel DON'T release curated drivers for each major title, they probably can't do that.

This is all pretty common understanding among anyone who used the Windows Nvidia drivers. Understanding which you clearly lack. I made no false statements.

AMD and Intel do release curated drivers almost each release. Here, take this:

AMD:
* https://www.guru3d.com/files-details...-download.html - optimized support for Ghostwire: Tokyo and Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands
* https://www.guru3d.com/files-details...-download.html - optimized support for Elden Ring, Shadow Warrior 3, GRID Legends

Intel:
* https://videocardz.com/driver/intel-...-30-0-101-1069 - optimized support for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (DX12), Deathloop (DX12), Horizon Zero Dawn (DX12), Metro Exodus (DX12)
* https://videocardz.com/driver/intel-...-30-0-100-9805 - support for NARAKA: BLADEPOINT
* https://www.xda-developers.com/new-i...psychonauts-2/ - support for Psychonauts 2

Again, no links, not proofs, no network dumps, nothing from you. Please do not reply to my messages from now on. Thank you! My ignore list on Phoronix is now full, I cannot ignore any more people.

[birdie]

You are doing it again, you posted a large wall of text and ignored the example I gave you. Did you miss it?

You did talk about me in the third person. Did I misunderstand something? Could you please stop talking about me and my manners and address what I say?

[Rabiator]

Wishful thinking like "nVidia should disappear from the face of the Earth" is not going to get anybody anywhere. There's a lot of people that earn money with nVidia cards and won't stop doing that because of your moral high stand. Luckily, AMD is catching up with compute capabilities and is consistently winning most of the contracts for top supercomputers. That might force nVidia to reevaluate its position way more than any empty complaint. Linus on the other hand, has every right to say "F$ck you" to nVidia, as he is the one putting the work of dealing with the problem. Same way as he said something similar about Intel and AVX-512.

The pressure has to come from the users, no doubt about that. I'm one of the people who refuse to buy Nvidia, because

1. I think I will get better long term support for an AMD GPU because the Linux open source driver will have less future compatibility issues. I'm using my PCs for a pretty long time and would be disappointed with less that 10 years of OS support.
2. and I dislike certain business practices of Nvidia, most recently their very restrictive NDA. Now Techpowerup sees this in a rather friendly light, but I'm not as optimistic.

Number 2 is my personal moral high horse and I won't apologize for that. But I'm not saying everybody has to follow me. Just explaining where I see problems with Nvidia. AMD are no saints but I expect less problems from using their hardware, and their behavior is less dickish by comparison.

For organizations who have their own R&D, open source drivers may have immediate advantages. In that case, Nvidia would either have to counter with extra support of their own (expensive) or lose some customers. The contracts for top supercomputers could be such cases.