3 ms·

Unlike other hardware, graphic cards don't have open specifications, so the only way third parties can write drivers is through reverse engineering, that's a bi

Unlike other hardware, graphic cards don't have open specifications, so the only way third parties can write drivers is through reverse engineering, that's a big handicap.

dogma1138 11y ago
The ISA's are more or less open AMD's are available for download, to get the ISA from NVIDIA you need to register and get a rubber stamped NDA. But still there isn't any one capable of writing a modern GPU kernel driver and a shader compiler for GPU's. The driver is doing a billion and a half optimizations, and fixes tons of errors that were left in the code during development at this point most AAA developers say "fuck it" let NVIDIA/AMD handle the performance and that's the best case, there have been cases where AAA titles were shipped with code that can't even initialize the display driver properly and it had to be fixed in the driver. Both AMD and NVIDIA pretty much keep their compiler and driver locked tight as a trade secret because it sort of is, the driver is what gives them to competitive edge and not in a million years would an FOSS team would be able to keep up with the release cycle for new games and new hardware. And for people that say well Vulcan will fix it, i highly doubt so, while Vulcan gives you very low level access to the GPU it's not the first API that did so, and it's very likely that developers will still continue to make the same mistakes as they did with DirectX which has by far more internal sanity checks and strict requirements than OpenGL. Valve might want to see Linux gaming and while they will be most likely able to compete with consoles they have very little chance of being able to compete with Windows based PC's unless there will be a cross platform unified driver architecture or NVIDIA and AMD will decide put as much development resources into their Linux driver as they invest in the Windows one.

Unlike other hardware, graphic cards don't have open specifications, so the only way third parties can write drivers is through reverse engineering, that's a big handicap.

dogma1138 11y ago

The ISA's are more or less open AMD's are available for download, to get the ISA from NVIDIA you need to register and get a rubber stamped NDA. But still there isn't any one capable of writing a modern GPU kernel driver and a shader compiler for GPU's. The driver is doing a billion and a half optimizations, and fixes tons of errors that were left in the code during development at this point most AAA developers say "fuck it" let NVIDIA/AMD handle the performance and that's the best case, there have been cases where AAA titles were shipped with code that can't even initialize the display driver properly and it had to be fixed in the driver. Both AMD and NVIDIA pretty much keep their compiler and driver locked tight as a trade secret because it sort of is, the driver is what gives them to competitive edge and not in a million years would an FOSS team would be able to keep up with the release cycle for new games and new hardware. And for people that say well Vulcan will fix it, i highly doubt so, while Vulcan gives you very low level access to the GPU it's not the first API that did so, and it's very likely that developers will still continue to make the same mistakes as they did with DirectX which has by far more internal sanity checks and strict requirements than OpenGL. Valve might want to see Linux gaming and while they will be most likely able to compete with consoles they have very little chance of being able to compete with Windows based PC's unless there will be a cross platform unified driver architecture or NVIDIA and AMD will decide put as much development resources into their Linux driver as they invest in the Windows one.