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> When nVidia got what it wanted from Linux by dominating compute space using CUDA, they've just left visual part of their drivers to rot. Have they ever taken

by est31 6y ago

> When nVidia got what it wanted from Linux by dominating compute space using CUDA, they've just left visual part of their drivers to rot. Have they ever taken proper care of the visual part? I've thought that it exists in the first place because of the SFX industry's heavy use of GNU/Linux and Nvidia. That's a fraction of their market share so only got a fraction of their attention, likely mainly to avoid vacating the area for competitors than to actually make money (bad ROI compared to Windows).

sandworm101 6y ago
>> bad ROI compared to Windows Windows is essentially just the gaming market. Gamers are fickle, only buying a card every couple years and are very price conscious. But AI, and any other datacenter uses of GPUs (mining) buy cards in bulk, are not fickle, and are not obsessed with daily price fluctuations. Those are the markets Nvidea wants to be in and they are dominated by linux. Not playing nice with linux gamers will come back to haunt Nvidea. Also, one should not underestimate the bias that gaming generates. All those linux gamers who suffer poor drivers while gaming saturday night walk into jobs at datacenters and AI research groups each monday. They remember. I certainly do. All things being equal, I lean towards AMD whenever the boss asks my opinion on our next purchase.
- bayindirh 6y ago
  It's much more complicated. The application diversity is much higher than it looks. There are also Quadro cards aimed at professional OpenGL acceleration for GIS, 3D modeling, CAD, etc. These applications run on both Windows and Linux (soem are cross platform, some are platform locked) and, the ROI pie is a complicated picture. Windows is dominated by gamers and casual users, that's right, however it's not the sole market for gaming. Steam is pushing for Linux in a relentless pace. Steam in Linux is getting rooted like a Sequoia tree. When it becomes visible, its roots will be much deeper and stronger than the trunk (which is a good thing). nVidia used to care for Linux users. Extensions required by composition, off-screen rendering and other stuff came to nVidia first (when compared to AMD). Video acceleration is also the same (AMD's video acceleration technologies can were much better than nVidia due to their legacy but, they acted slow. They're even now. Maybe AMD is still better. I need to test). This trend reared its ugly head ~3 years ago for me. I've upgraded my monitor to a DP one and DPMS went out of window. Screen suspension and standby has gone. They didn't fix it for older cards for ~1 year IIRC. Currently I'm experiencing a strange frame-rate drop. Will investigate when I have time. If an onboard Intel card can drive same DE (KDE) on a same resolution screen better with a much inferior CPU when compared to a triple-slot, out of the box overclocked GTX680, then there's something very, very wrong. nVidia was top of the line, just works out of the box GPU vendor. Now due to its arrogance and dominance, cracks start to appear. Even Intel's driver blunders are solved faster (ah, they're open source).

by est31 6y ago

sandworm101 6y ago

>> bad ROI compared to Windows Windows is essentially just the gaming market. Gamers are fickle, only buying a card every couple years and are very price conscious. But AI, and any other datacenter uses of GPUs (mining) buy cards in bulk, are not fickle, and are not obsessed with daily price fluctuations. Those are the markets Nvidea wants to be in and they are dominated by linux. Not playing nice with linux gamers will come back to haunt Nvidea. Also, one should not underestimate the bias that gaming generates. All those linux gamers who suffer poor drivers while gaming saturday night walk into jobs at datacenters and AI research groups each monday. They remember. I certainly do. All things being equal, I lean towards AMD whenever the boss asks my opinion on our next purchase.

bayindirh 6y ago
It's much more complicated. The application diversity is much higher than it looks. There are also Quadro cards aimed at professional OpenGL acceleration for GIS, 3D modeling, CAD, etc. These applications run on both Windows and Linux (soem are cross platform, some are platform locked) and, the ROI pie is a complicated picture. Windows is dominated by gamers and casual users, that's right, however it's not the sole market for gaming. Steam is pushing for Linux in a relentless pace. Steam in Linux is getting rooted like a Sequoia tree. When it becomes visible, its roots will be much deeper and stronger than the trunk (which is a good thing). nVidia used to care for Linux users. Extensions required by composition, off-screen rendering and other stuff came to nVidia first (when compared to AMD). Video acceleration is also the same (AMD's video acceleration technologies can were much better than nVidia due to their legacy but, they acted slow. They're even now. Maybe AMD is still better. I need to test). This trend reared its ugly head ~3 years ago for me. I've upgraded my monitor to a DP one and DPMS went out of window. Screen suspension and standby has gone. They didn't fix it for older cards for ~1 year IIRC. Currently I'm experiencing a strange frame-rate drop. Will investigate when I have time. If an onboard Intel card can drive same DE (KDE) on a same resolution screen better with a much inferior CPU when compared to a triple-slot, out of the box overclocked GTX680, then there's something very, very wrong. nVidia was top of the line, just works out of the box GPU vendor. Now due to its arrogance and dominance, cracks start to appear. Even Intel's driver blunders are solved faster (ah, they're open source).