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Nvidia DLSS Source Code Leaked
- frogger8 5y agoAs I predicted 3 days ago ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30471005 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30471005
- westmeal 5y agoHahaha yes! Congrats to whoever did this!
- SketchySeaBeast 5y agoWhy the congratulations? Other than intellectual curiosity how is this a positive? As I understand it no other company can now get even close to matching these techniques without legal accusations of copying the code coming about.
- pom66 5y ago>Why the congratulations? Valve and everyone has been stealing pc games for 23+ years since 1997. In case you weren't aware, in the 90's any hacker worth his salt, if you suggested taking up any client-server app you were looked at as a pariah, it's the ultimate security risk. Trusted computing is literally them stealing ownership of your PC, the TPM and "security chips" are all about ending you controlling your pc, you can't have any privacy when microsoft can force update your bios with windows update. That's what the big plan was since the mid 90's. Go have a read, if you still think personal computer ownership isn't under attack you're clueless: https://web2.qatar.cmu.edu/cs/15349/dl/DRM-TC.pdf https://web2.qatar.cmu.edu/cs/15349/dl/DRM-TC.pdf You don't grasp that two or more computers in a network become and hehave as single device. So you never want a client-server exe, that's the same thing as getting your computer hacked and owned, they can spy on you and do anything because you can't audit the source. That's why anyone with a clue wants to avoid windows 10+ with TPM chips because they can remote update your system and disable cracked or other software they don't approve of, when there is plenty of legit reasons for cracking old software. It's also why level editors disappeared in AAA Games, basic multiplayer was a feature that came in every AAA Game in the 90's until Richard garriot had the bright idea of stealing the networking code, coding it in a weird way and selling it back to the public minus ownership. You don't seem to grasp after the 2008 bailouts and the war in IRAQ, you live in a lawless oligarchy who's laws have been bribed into being for 200 years. Copyright law was originally invented to preserve human culture, in the modern era, it's just been endlessly extended. The average citizen is politically illiterate and ignorant that he doensn't live in a democracy but a lawless oligarchy.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y agoBut how does the leak change any of that?
- Raineer 5y agoYeah, just gotta echo this. That was a whole lot of noise to really not make any point. Like - I even agree with most of what was typed, but I don't see it's relevance to anything here.
- 1_player 5y agoNone at all, if you check their post history they've been going on about MMOs stealing code for a whole day on multiple threads. It's probably some novelty troll account.
- no_time 5y agoA really unfortunate troll as the core of his argument, the invasive corporate control over our computing is indeed real and worrying.
- pom66 5y ago
- yondapur 5y ago
- koofdoof 5y agoDo you have any references about Richard Garriot stealing networking code? I havent heard of that before.
- pom66 5y ago
- cauefcr 5y agoInformation wants to be free.
- sweezyjeezy 5y agoMaybe a dumb question - why would Nvidia not publish all their code then?
- SketchySeaBeast 5y agoBecause this would be people explicitly gaining and using information from an illegal act.
- rasz 5y agoNvidia took pushing bullshit proprietary APIs to the next level after seeing how ell Creative did with EAX killing competition. Not much love out there for things like GameWorks https://pcper.com/2014/05/nvidia-and-amd-fight-over-nvidia-gameworks-program-devil-in-the-details/ https://pcper.com/2014/05/nvidia-and-amd-fight-over-nvidia-g...
- chii 5y agoi hope this might offer the feature for AMD cards, or something unified so that this feature could be utilized in games without having specific hardware.
- ChuckNorris89 5y agoHow? Nvidia's lawyers will be all over that shit. Not AMD and no respectable OSS devs will touch it, nor will GitHub or any other reputable platform host it. It's legally radioactive. Nintendo's HDL and source code also leaked from a hack a couple of years ago but given how litigious Nintendo is, nothing came out of it despite everyone expecting some emulators to pop op.
- userbinator 5y agoIt's called "don't ask, don't tell" and "parallel construction".
- ChrisRR 5y agoI'm sure nVidia's lawyers will respect "don't ask"
- userbinator 5y agoThat's when the parallel construction comes in. Obviously anyone copying the code verbatim or close to it deserves to get the lawyers coming after them, but plausible deniability should be strongly kept in mind for people doing RE+reimplement work anyway.
- xxs 5y agoif anything - it makes it worse. The code is untouchable for any serious company or even open source. If you need references see what WinNT/XP code leaks did to Wine project.
- nilstycho 5y ago
- pdenton 5y agoApparently, DLSS means "Deep Learning Super Sampling".
- distantsounds 5y agoThere is no "apparently." That's what it means. That's the acronym.
- fatbas202 5y agoThen let's also point out that it is NOT an acronym, but instead an initialism.
- neogodless 5y agohttps://www.wordnik.com/words/acronym https://www.wordnik.com/words/acronym But... an initialism is an acronym. So it's both. > an initialism is an acronym that is pronounced as individual letters EDIT: Guess it depends on the source; even my link above says an acronym is "a pronounceable word", but another link I had clicked on had the quote above. shrug
- dspillett 5y agoI was taught the other way around: an acronym is an initialism that can be pronounced as a word, all acronyms are initialisms but not all initialisms are acronyms.
- meego 5y agoCan the nouveau project make use of this without ending in legal hot water?
- mschuster91 5y agoThe roadblock for nouveau is that the chipset won't allow the clocks to be set to performant frequencies unless the NVIDIA-signed binary firmware blob is uploaded.
- protoman3000 5y agoWhich still can be used, no? All we need is to know the API to the firmware blob, which this leak probably shows nicely
- samus 5y agoReplacing the firmware blob too is kinda the point of the driver. Now, if also the signing key were in the dump, people could finally sign their own firmware blobs. It's probably not legal to facilitate that in any way, but how can it be proven if you don't distribute any homegrown blobs? Edit: even if the Nvidia blob were used, it would (i) be a big departure from Mesa architecture and infrastructure and (ii) it would be illegal to distribute it. Nvidia could also introduce an arbitrary amount of protocol madness to make accessing the firmware blob as difficult as possible.
- Nextgrid 5y ago> it would be illegal to distribute it Fortunately Nvidia provides all their drivers free of charge on their website, so it shouldn't be hard to download and extract it at install time?
- samus 5y agoThe other points still stand. And it's possible there is also a legal reason that prohibits taking apart the driver. In any case, it would defeat the purpose of having an open source driver.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jonpalmisc 5y agoTo be abundantly clear: I'd hate to have my source code leaked. But I will admit that incidents like these or the Windows XP source leak are fascinating. I'd hope others share the same curiosity I have for getting to "peek behind the scenes" of some impressive software and engineering accomplishments.
- snvzz 5y agoReminder: Software patents aren't a thing in most of the world. This is a good thing, as this code should be studied and documented and free alternatives written while referencing this documentation.
- jaywalk 5y agoEven without software patents, I doubt it's legal in most of the world to implement something using somebody else's stolen source code. A clean room process would still be necessary.
- cauefcr 5y agoIt really depends on the country, afaik it is legal to do straight up reverse engineering in Brazil.
- orev 5y agoReverse engineering is the opposite of using stolen source code to reimplement something, and it’s legal most places.
- mistrial9 5y agothere will always be "race to the bottom" labs and territories. The questions lie in "what restrictions will be placed in the markets as the results of the leak drift back and reappear en-masse".. China (printing capital) does not respect written word copyright in English.. this has been going on for decades.
- xbar 5y agoIt depends on how you define "most of the world." By country count, in most of the world (>50%), there is not a notion of "stealing source code." There are notions of stealing cattle and pottery. But legal frameworks have not really caught up.
- benbristow 5y agoWhat about projects like WINE - now in use by corporations like Valve? Surely someone who's worked on the project must have seen Microsoft/Windows source code.
- MasterScrat 5y agoVery exciting, I hope this will help open-source hardware-accelerated image upscaling. To get an idea of what image upscaling can do, check out this subreddit dedicated to artificially increasing the resolution of old video game assets to give them a new life: https://www.reddit.com/r/GameUpscale/ https://www.reddit.com/r/GameUpscale/ Here's eg some personal experiments with the game Baldur's Gate: https://www.reddit.com/r/baldursgate/comments/aemu8u/upscaling_bg2s_assets_using_machine_learning/ https://www.reddit.com/r/baldursgate/comments/aemu8u/upscali... - Image in: https://i.imgur.com/xMbqIeo.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/xMbqIeo.jpeg - Image out, without human intervention: https://i.imgur.com/nC2o1vM.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/nC2o1vM.jpeg The community is using tools such as ESRGAN for that (https://github.com/xinntao/ESRGAN https://github.com/xinntao/ESRGAN), which leverages GPU acceleration as it uses PyTorch. So far, this upsampling ability was only used in commercial games: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning_super_sampling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning_super_sampling
- kllrnohj 5y ago> I hope this will enable open-source hardware-accelerated image upscaling That's already a thing (especially with AMDs FSR already being open source), but regardless keep in mind that DLSS 2.0+ requires engine support because it also uses things like motion vectors. Retrofitting this into old games is possible, but likely non-trivial, and would require the game to be adjusted it's not something the driver can just do. > However, recent NVIDIA GPUs contain dedicated silicon to perform this type of upscaling, which I'm really hoping will make things even faster! There's no dedicated silicon for DLSS. It's "just" the tensor cores, which are programmable and is something PyTorch already has access to. CUDA support for those have been around for a while after all: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/programming-tensor-cores-cuda-9/ https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/programming-tensor-cores-c...
- MasterScrat 5y ago> There's no dedicated silicon for DLSS. You're right, corrected.
- petermcneeley 5y ago