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NVIDIA repeats the exact same terrible behavior with Linux stuff over and over again (as the article put it, "throwing code/blobs over the wall and expecting ev

by opencl 9y ago

NVIDIA repeats the exact same terrible behavior with Linux stuff over and over again (as the article put it, "throwing code/blobs over the wall and expecting everyone to change for them") and IMO they deserve large amounts of angry public criticism over it until they stop.

shmerl 9y ago
Because of the rapid Mesa progress, Nvidia will suffer gradual decline of the Linux user base as time will go on. I'm not sure if they care enough to do anything about it though. Potential setbacks in CUDA usage can bite them more, but for that Khronos need to ramp up their effort of Vulkan based CL-next[1] or whatever it will be called. 1. http://hexus.net/tech/news/software/105895-vulkan-opencl-will-merge-single-api/ http://hexus.net/tech/news/software/105895-vulkan-opencl-wil...
synicalx 9y ago
I kind of sympathise with NVIDIA in all this; they've got a very tiny and very vocal market share that behaves very very differently from their main customer base. With Windows users NVIDIA know that they want pretty games and they want them prettier very year, and they also know that Microsoft is probably going to work with them to make that happen. They've also got game developers and hardware vendors lining up to get NVIDIA logos on their products. Whereas in Linuxland, they've got a kernel, a billion side-projects that may or may not be widely used and they all want NVIDIA to conform the THEIR way of doing things, an angry Finnish gentleman who just shouts and swears at things he doesn't like, and a largely non-gaming and very fragmented user base that could be using any number of desktop environments/kernel versions/drivers etc. On top of all that, this menagerie only accounts for about 3.8% of the desktop market. And they're also kicking and screaming that NVIDIA isn't doing enough to support the things that they want to do. Sure NVIDIA could be working faster to better support Linux by throwing more people and money at it, but they don't have to and until more people use Linux they don't really have much of an incentive to do so. They'll probably have better Linux support, eventually, and if that fits in with their business plan then that's fine. If you're a Linux user and NVIDIA doesn't do what you want it to do, then that's fine as well - vote with your wallet and buy from someone else.
- shmerl 9y ago
  > If you're a Linux user and NVIDIA doesn't do what you want it to do, then that's fine as well - vote with your wallet and buy from someone else. That's exactly what's happening. But the other side of the coin is, that in order to switch, the other choice should be good enough. Until recently, AMD had too many downsides, that many were ready to suffer through Nvidia's problems. But that is changing now. You can observe the trend here (it's not a big sample yet, but it's still showing the trend): https://www.gamingonlinux.com/users/statistics#trends https://www.gamingonlinux.com/users/statistics#trends Note: you need to click "trends" there to display change over time.
- rodgerd 9y ago
  > I kind of sympathise with NVIDIA in all this Nvidia are toxic arseholes whose business practises are on a par with 90s Microsoft - funding games studios to deliver crippled-on-AMD games, for example. They deserve bankruptcy, not sympathy.
- danieldk 9y ago
  Whereas in Linuxland, they've got a kernel, a billion side-projects that may or may not be widely used and they all want NVIDIA to conform the THEIR way of doing things, an angry Finnish gentleman who just shouts and swears at things he doesn't like, and a largely non-gaming and very fragmented user base that could be using any number of desktop environments/kernel versions/drivers etc. There is one big elephant in the room here that you are missing and that is GPU computing. This is probably a big market for them now (Teslas go for a couple of thousand a pop) and the vast majority of it is on Linux. Their ecosystem with CUDA and CuDNN is pretty awesome, on the other hand, their driver has issues. At any rate, it's a market that they cannot afford to lose. As OpenCL support for e.g. machine learning libraries such as Tensorflow is progressing they may not have a lock on the market as they have now.
  - ktta 9y ago
    >As OpenCL support for e.g. machine learning libraries such as Tensorflow is progressing I wonder if the complex OpenCL API throws off many ML developers. Also I think they tend to focus on CUDA because there is much less chance of it breaking between devices. OTOH, each vendor has their own .so for OpenCL and they usually tend to be buggy and stay a point version or two behind. This is the explanation I tell myself when I wonder why the hell Google chose CUDA over OpenCL.
intoverflow2 9y ago
Who really loses out in this scenario though? It sure as hell isn't going to be Nvidia who hold all the cards as far as CUDA based computing goes. People who want to use this tech will go where the tech is, people even switch away from Mac to Windows to access this tech.

by opencl 9y ago

shmerl 9y ago

Because of the rapid Mesa progress, Nvidia will suffer gradual decline of the Linux user base as time will go on. I'm not sure if they care enough to do anything about it though. Potential setbacks in CUDA usage can bite them more, but for that Khronos need to ramp up their effort of Vulkan based CL-next[1] or whatever it will be called. 1. http://hexus.net/tech/news/software/105895-vulkan-opencl-will-merge-single-api/ http://hexus.net/tech/news/software/105895-vulkan-opencl-wil...

synicalx 9y ago

I kind of sympathise with NVIDIA in all this; they've got a very tiny and very vocal market share that behaves very very differently from their main customer base. With Windows users NVIDIA know that they want pretty games and they want them prettier very year, and they also know that Microsoft is probably going to work with them to make that happen. They've also got game developers and hardware vendors lining up to get NVIDIA logos on their products. Whereas in Linuxland, they've got a kernel, a billion side-projects that may or may not be widely used and they all want NVIDIA to conform the THEIR way of doing things, an angry Finnish gentleman who just shouts and swears at things he doesn't like, and a largely non-gaming and very fragmented user base that could be using any number of desktop environments/kernel versions/drivers etc. On top of all that, this menagerie only accounts for about 3.8% of the desktop market. And they're also kicking and screaming that NVIDIA isn't doing enough to support the things that they want to do. Sure NVIDIA could be working faster to better support Linux by throwing more people and money at it, but they don't have to and until more people use Linux they don't really have much of an incentive to do so. They'll probably have better Linux support, eventually, and if that fits in with their business plan then that's fine. If you're a Linux user and NVIDIA doesn't do what you want it to do, then that's fine as well - vote with your wallet and buy from someone else.

shmerl 9y ago
> If you're a Linux user and NVIDIA doesn't do what you want it to do, then that's fine as well - vote with your wallet and buy from someone else. That's exactly what's happening. But the other side of the coin is, that in order to switch, the other choice should be good enough. Until recently, AMD had too many downsides, that many were ready to suffer through Nvidia's problems. But that is changing now. You can observe the trend here (it's not a big sample yet, but it's still showing the trend): https://www.gamingonlinux.com/users/statistics#trends https://www.gamingonlinux.com/users/statistics#trends Note: you need to click "trends" there to display change over time.
rodgerd 9y ago
> I kind of sympathise with NVIDIA in all this Nvidia are toxic arseholes whose business practises are on a par with 90s Microsoft - funding games studios to deliver crippled-on-AMD games, for example. They deserve bankruptcy, not sympathy.
danieldk 9y ago
Whereas in Linuxland, they've got a kernel, a billion side-projects that may or may not be widely used and they all want NVIDIA to conform the THEIR way of doing things, an angry Finnish gentleman who just shouts and swears at things he doesn't like, and a largely non-gaming and very fragmented user base that could be using any number of desktop environments/kernel versions/drivers etc. There is one big elephant in the room here that you are missing and that is GPU computing. This is probably a big market for them now (Teslas go for a couple of thousand a pop) and the vast majority of it is on Linux. Their ecosystem with CUDA and CuDNN is pretty awesome, on the other hand, their driver has issues. At any rate, it's a market that they cannot afford to lose. As OpenCL support for e.g. machine learning libraries such as Tensorflow is progressing they may not have a lock on the market as they have now.
- ktta 9y ago
  >As OpenCL support for e.g. machine learning libraries such as Tensorflow is progressing I wonder if the complex OpenCL API throws off many ML developers. Also I think they tend to focus on CUDA because there is much less chance of it breaking between devices. OTOH, each vendor has their own .so for OpenCL and they usually tend to be buggy and stay a point version or two behind. This is the explanation I tell myself when I wonder why the hell Google chose CUDA over OpenCL.

intoverflow2 9y ago

Who really loses out in this scenario though? It sure as hell isn't going to be Nvidia who hold all the cards as far as CUDA based computing goes. People who want to use this tech will go where the tech is, people even switch away from Mac to Windows to access this tech.