3 ms·

That's the sort of talk companies with market share of Microsoft or ecosystem of Apple can afford. I am a Linux desktop user myself but: a) The AMD drivers we

by janoc 8y ago

That's the sort of talk companies with market share of Microsoft or ecosystem of Apple can afford. I am a Linux desktop user myself but: a) The AMD drivers were unusable crap for a very long time, things have improved only thanks to the open source driver (that ATI/AMD did not write, they only contributed specs). Basically 3D and OpenGL in Linux was for years synonymous with "buy Nvidia, it works". b) I don't understand this "holier than thou" attitudes when Linux desktop isn't even a blip on the radar and pretty much contributes zero to the bottom line of these companies. However, it tends to have the most vocal, noisy and abusive users ... Instead of being glad that Nvidia actually supports Linux (and FreeBSD and few other free OSes) for ~20 years now (before ATI even had a Linux driver at all!), we heap abuse on them because their drivers aren't to our taste? Would it be better if they cut their losses and stop providing this support? Especially for stuff that doesn't have any alternatives, such as CUDA? And no, Intel integrated graphics really isn't an option for high performance graphics and ATI's open source drivers are quite a bit slower. Of course, if all you need is requiring accelerated desktop so that you can have nice transparency/compositing and accelerated video playing, then you won't see this. I don't get where did you get the idea about the "lowest common denominator quality driver" from Nvidia. Sure there are bugs and issues (e.g. with suspend) but in my experience the Nvidia graphic drivers were the least troublesome when it came to application support, OpenGL spec + extension support and various bugs. And I have been using 3D drivers in Linux essentially from the very beginning, when the top end hardware meant a 3DFX card or later a Riva TNT. My diploma thesis ran on a 3DFX back in the day ... That said, it doesn't mean we shouldn't complain when something doesn't work but let's not forget the size of the market. A dose of reality helps - jumping up and down and yelling really really loud to look important doesn't make one so.

bubblethink 8y ago
>Would it be better if they cut their losses and stop providing this support? Especially for stuff that doesn't have any alternatives, such as CUDA? They'd lose more if they did that. Do you think the whole world of HPC/ML/scientific computing will switch to windows to use nvidia cards ? The answer to that is no. They'll just move over to AMD. ROCM is coming along fairly well. Or something else will pop up. Don't get too attached to blobs.
- twtw 8y ago
  They could drop graphics support on Linux with no significant losses to their hpc/ml market.
  - bubblethink 8y ago
    Yes, that is somewhat true I think. They could just expose an accelerator device without any graphics capabilities. I was replying to the parent's point that CUDA is not hostage. They lose more if they drop CUDA on linux.
dmm 8y ago
> that ATI/AMD did not write, they only contributed specs This is a lie. All of the main contributors for the amdgpu drivers are AMD employees. The files in drivers/gpu/drm/amd/amdgpu all have AMD copyrights in the headers.
sevensor 8y ago
I'll grant you, 18 years ago, Nvidia's drivers were superior by virtue of existing at all. That's a long time ago. The competition has improved, and the Nvidia experience has steadily gotten worse. I have a desktop machine at work that locks up hard with the proprietary driver, and another one where X randomly crashes if you use nouveau. Any goodwill they had with me for providing proprietary drivers on Linux over a decade ago has long since evaporated. Their hardware may benchmark well, but in my experience it's unstable and I suspect they're papering over a poor design with opaque drivers.

by janoc 8y ago

bubblethink 8y ago

>Would it be better if they cut their losses and stop providing this support? Especially for stuff that doesn't have any alternatives, such as CUDA? They'd lose more if they did that. Do you think the whole world of HPC/ML/scientific computing will switch to windows to use nvidia cards ? The answer to that is no. They'll just move over to AMD. ROCM is coming along fairly well. Or something else will pop up. Don't get too attached to blobs.

twtw 8y ago
They could drop graphics support on Linux with no significant losses to their hpc/ml market.
- bubblethink 8y ago
  Yes, that is somewhat true I think. They could just expose an accelerator device without any graphics capabilities. I was replying to the parent's point that CUDA is not hostage. They lose more if they drop CUDA on linux.

dmm 8y ago

> that ATI/AMD did not write, they only contributed specs This is a lie. All of the main contributors for the amdgpu drivers are AMD employees. The files in drivers/gpu/drm/amd/amdgpu all have AMD copyrights in the headers.

sevensor 8y ago

I'll grant you, 18 years ago, Nvidia's drivers were superior by virtue of existing at all. That's a long time ago. The competition has improved, and the Nvidia experience has steadily gotten worse. I have a desktop machine at work that locks up hard with the proprietary driver, and another one where X randomly crashes if you use nouveau. Any goodwill they had with me for providing proprietary drivers on Linux over a decade ago has long since evaporated. Their hardware may benchmark well, but in my experience it's unstable and I suspect they're papering over a poor design with opaque drivers.