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Thing is, I need NVidia because of CUDA. It's so frustrating to be put in a situation where I have to deal with the sucky drivers because, where else am I going

Thing is, I need NVidia because of CUDA. It's so frustrating to be put in a situation where I have to deal with the sucky drivers because, where else am I going to go? For some silly reason, AMD still has a reputation of "sub-par" to some science circles, and to this day I have no idea why that is the case. I suppose it's hard to market "OpenCL", which is why Khronos is rolling it into Vulkan very soon. NVidia showed up with just as much marketing as they did a useful product. And (please correct me if I'm wrong) OpenCL support in NVidia drivers is still in the "consideration" phases as far as I understand it.

mort96 7y ago
Yeah, it's certainly an issue, because people do have nvidia cards and they don't work as well as they should have on Linux. I'm just pointing out that it's in large part nvidia's fault, not really Linux' graphics stack's. I myself have an nvidia card in my desktop, and while it's _mostly_ fine with the proprietary drivers, there are occasional graphical glitches which just don't happen with other cards. (The nouveau drivers just don't work at all, which is also largely nvidia's fault from what I understand, due to not providing many docs and forcing the nouveau folks to reverse engineer everything.) Coincidentally, I decided to try getting into OpenCL a couple days ago. I've just used the Intel OpenCL runtime, but Arch Wiki's GPGPU page mentions opencl-nvidia: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GPGPU#NVIDIA https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GPGPU#NVIDIA I don't understand why CUDA is that big, when it's locked down and supported by only one vendor, and OpenCL exists and is open and supported by all vendors. But then again, there are probably some market forces I don't understand; I also can't really grasp why Direct3D is that big when it's locked down and supported by only one OS vendor and OpenGL exists.

mort96 7y ago

Yeah, it's certainly an issue, because people do have nvidia cards and they don't work as well as they should have on Linux. I'm just pointing out that it's in large part nvidia's fault, not really Linux' graphics stack's. I myself have an nvidia card in my desktop, and while it's _mostly_ fine with the proprietary drivers, there are occasional graphical glitches which just don't happen with other cards. (The nouveau drivers just don't work at all, which is also largely nvidia's fault from what I understand, due to not providing many docs and forcing the nouveau folks to reverse engineer everything.) Coincidentally, I decided to try getting into OpenCL a couple days ago. I've just used the Intel OpenCL runtime, but Arch Wiki's GPGPU page mentions opencl-nvidia: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GPGPU#NVIDIA https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GPGPU#NVIDIA I don't understand why CUDA is that big, when it's locked down and supported by only one vendor, and OpenCL exists and is open and supported by all vendors. But then again, there are probably some market forces I don't understand; I also can't really grasp why Direct3D is that big when it's locked down and supported by only one OS vendor and OpenGL exists.