Fedora Project Leader Calls Out NVIDIA Over Their Proprietary Linux Drivers

[clockwork]

There are many critical unresolved issues some of which have remained unfixed for months if not years. If that's "support" for you, then I rest my case.

You must be allergic to facts if you think using them amounts to "trolling" and thus I recommend that you stop replying to my posts. I prefer to have a logical discourse not an emotional one however it's wishful thinking considering so many here believe they are very special since they chose to run Linux on their devices.

If you don't see the irony in your statement, there's nothing anyone can say to you to make you realize that you don't come off as this "logical" and highly intelligent being that you want to portray yourself as.
Which is a shame because you do have logical and intelligent takes on certain things. Even if I find myself agreeing with you on something, I can't with a straight face agree to some of your ridiculous "evidence" and "facts". Or to your oh-so-condescending tone. For example (unironically) linking the List of fallacies on Wikipedia... which hilariously should mean you must be aware how much linking an entire issues section of a gitlab is a strawman. But hey, if that's what you measure support against, Gnome must have REALLY bad support on Linux.

No, my ridicule at your position does not mean I'm allergic to "facts". Similarly to how earlier you demonstrated a clear lack of understanding on how Nvidia Windows drivers work, and honestly what the "game-ready" driver profiles are on a very fundamental level. I'm the first person to dismiss knee-jerk comments about Nvidia's Linux support (which I did. I agreed with you, that's the funny part). But your "facts" and evidence... Oh boy.

[Rabiator]

At least on Windows where the money actually is NVIDIA does provide much better and longer support for its products than AMD and Intel. As to Linux being in a good shape in terms of being supported by AMD, woah, stop right there please.

AMD and Intel also provide reviewer guidelines and AMD has also made mistakes in this regard (I'm too lazy to find sources right now). This particular incident is important but not the be-all and end-all.

Your personal moral high horse is called confirmation bias. You want to love AMD for its open source drivers and then no matter how bad the actual support is you will still choose AMD over NVIDIA and you will actively seek for "facts" trying to justify your choice and dismiss everything which says otherwise.

You are right about the relatively short AMD support under Windows, Nvidia is better there. Not sure about Intel iGPUs, I never used them for more than Office stuff and for a long time they were unfit for running newer games anyway. ARC will be the first generation of Intel GPUs that performs better than an old Nvidia 1030 GT.

But I don't personally care that much about Windows anymore. At the moment, I still have a Windows partition on my PC for games, but it will likely be gone after the next PC upgrade. Proton/WINE are approaching the point where the remaining weaknesses will be less irritating to me than Windows in general. I don't think Linux is perfect, but Microsoft is actually managing to make Windows worse over time. Slow but steady improvement in Linux + Windows regressing = time to switch (which is mostly done for me).

About the quality of support in general, the content of a bug tracker can make things look worse than they are. We just don't see Nvidia's bug tracker because it is not public. But don't take my word for it, look at Michael's reviews here on Phoronix. Nvidia does not look better than AMD here.

Finally, your statement about my confirmation bias is exactly the sort of inflammatory language RahalSundaram complained about. You may disagree with my opinion about Nvidia's conduct, but claiming to know my motivations better than I do is pretty arrogant.

[piotrj3]

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.

Wrong. Both Nvidia and AMD (not sure about intel) release profiles for specific games to make them work. However they are mostly not optimalization profiles, they are mostly profiles to ensure game works right. If you doubt that, there is 3rd party tool called nvidia profile inspector and you can modify it to your needs, most of those bits are simply extended profiles you get from nvidia control panel.

Actually there used to be reverse case, when Monster Hunter World was running fine with old drivers, and after new "game ready driver" made this game a hell.

[clockwork]

Wrong. Both Nvidia and AMD (not sure about intel) release profiles for specific games to make them work. However they are mostly not optimalization profiles, they are mostly profiles to ensure game works right. If you doubt that, there is 3rd party tool called nvidia profile inspector and you can modify it to your needs, most of those bits are simply extended profiles you get from nvidia control panel.

Actually there used to be reverse case, when Monster Hunter World was running fine with old drivers, and after new "game ready driver" made this game a hell.

"Game profiles" that profile inspector allows you to dissect and change settings for that specific game, are the very definition of driver level optimizations for a specific game that I was arguing with Birdie about. Whether to improve performance, or change drivers so all features of the game work, it doesn't matter. Also, A lot of those settings are in Control Panel, you are correct. But they are still optimizations released by Nvidia for a specific game.

I do remember that actually. You're right, some of them are hit and miss. No arguments there. But if you believe that because sometimes Nvidia misses the mark and releases "game-ready" drivers that hurt performance means they aren't trying to actively have better performance in games than the competition on comparable hardware, you're kidding yourself. Benchmarks and FPS numbers are everything to these companies.

[stargeizer]

Wrong. Both Nvidia and AMD (not sure about intel) release profiles for specific games to make them work. However they are mostly not optimalization profiles, they are mostly profiles to ensure game works right. If you doubt that, there is 3rd party tool called nvidia profile inspector and you can modify it to your needs, most of those bits are simply extended profiles you get from nvidia control panel.

Actually there used to be reverse case, when Monster Hunter World was running fine with old drivers, and after new "game ready driver" made this game a hell.

In case of Nvidia, this is false. Is true that Nvidia promotes and releases the Geforce Experience add-on that provides profiles for games, but driver wise, they stop at nothing to get the last frame per second they can in Windows. Nvidia enginners do lots of trickery with the GPU/VRAM speed (and generated heat, mind you) and is optimized on a "by game" basis , replaces shader binaries (in case of some games, they replace the entire shader set) to get most of the speed, and with DLSS they do adapt the raytracing engine in a "by game" basis (altough this requires explicit game support too). Because of that (and some other reasons no coder that worked with nvidia engineers shall discuss ever) we do affectionately call Nvidia "THE graphics mafia". (or in my case, used too, since i'm retired yay!!!)

Seriously, these guys are serious business.

For older games tho, you'll want to stick with older drivers. From time to time, optimizations are removed from the driver, otherwise it would be a gigantic blob nowadays.

For those wanting Nvidia opening their Geforce/Quadro/RTX lines of drivers, give up already. As Jen-Hsun Huang once said to a spanish medium: "We're a software company... doing hardware". They long ago started to expand to other areas of business and they do invest a lot of money in software R&D, so their drivers are "THE" money maker. They do have open drivers where makes sense to have one (Tegra and partially Jetson i believe, i can be wrong on these two tho), but for their main line of hardware, i doubt they want to open these. It's just R&D is too much valuable as an advantage over the competition to giving up these to the competition, (or worse, sharing the codebase that gives some use to the competition).

Get real guys. No ammount of trolling will change reality.

[sabian2008]

You all keep talking about games, when computing is almost as big as gaming revenue source for nVidia, but way more concentrated: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/n...nd-fiscal-2022.

[birdie]

No, my ridicule at your position does not mean I'm allergic to "facts". Similarly to how earlier you demonstrated a clear lack of understanding on how Nvidia Windows drivers work, and honestly what the "game-ready" driver profiles are on a very fundamental level. I'm the first person to dismiss knee-jerk comments about Nvidia's Linux support (which I did. I agreed with you, that's the funny part). But your "facts" and evidence... Oh boy.

And you continue with this BS which I've already addressed three times and others as well.

[birdie]

You all keep talking about games, when computing is almost as big as gaming revenue source for nVidia, but way more concentrated: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/n...nd-fiscal-2022.

It's the biggest one according the their earnings report.

[birdie]

In case of Nvidia, this is false. Is true that Nvidia promotes and releases the Geforce Experience add-on that provides profiles for games, but driver wise, they stop at nothing to get the last frame per second they can in Windows. Nvidia enginners do lots of trickery with the GPU/VRAM speed (and generated heat, mind you) and is optimized on a "by game" basis , replaces shader binaries (in case of some games, they replace the entire shader set) to get most of the speed, and with DLSS they do adapt the raytracing engine in a "by game" basis (altough this requires explicit game support too). Because of that (and some other reasons no coder that worked with nvidia engineers shall discuss ever) we do affectionately call Nvidia "THE graphics mafia". (or in my case, used too, since i'm retired yay!!!)

What is this magic GPU/VRAM speed trickery? Proofs please! Not some forum posts from weirdos, I need reputable sources!

and is optimized on a "by game" basis

AMD and Intel do the same!

replaces shader binaries (in case of some games, they replace the entire shader set) to get most of the speed

I need proofs! Something on a wide scale please! Because, yes, NVIDIA did that for rare broken games which were incorrectly coded in the first place.

with DLSS they do adapt the raytracing engine in a "by game" basis

I need proofs! Meanwhile RTRT workflows run several times faster on Ampere than on RDNA2 because NVIDIA GPUs have dedicated ray tracing cores while AMD sort of reuses shaders.



Amazing conspiracy theories and driver magic only NVIDIA possess. It's like their GPUs are made from magical stuff while poor AMD and Intel use plain old silicon.

Next on the list "AMD produces better image than NVIDIA" which has been debunked a hundred times already and was last true circa 2004 when both NVIDIA and AMD cheated with some settings which were hard to implement.

Never heard of such outrageously crazy and wild theories about NVIDIA. LMAO.

[user1]

In case of Nvidia, this is false. Is true that Nvidia promotes and releases the Geforce Experience add-on that provides profiles for games, but driver wise, they stop at nothing to get the last frame per second they can in Windows. Nvidia enginners do lots of trickery with the GPU/VRAM speed (and generated heat, mind you) and is optimized on a "by game" basis , replaces shader binaries (in case of some games, they replace the entire shader set) to get most of the speed, and with DLSS they do adapt the raytracing engine in a "by game" basis (altough this requires explicit game support too). Because of that (and some other reasons no coder that worked with nvidia engineers shall discuss ever) we do affectionately call Nvidia "THE graphics mafia". (or in my case, used too, since i'm retired yay!!!)

Seriously, these guys are serious business.

I have to say some of the stuff you wrote here sounds really familiar. Is it from that 2014 blog post of a Valve employee that discussed the OpenGL driver quality of different vendors?