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> So, NVIDIA, the choice is yours! Either: Officially make current and all future drivers for all cards open source, while keeping the Verilog and chipset trade

• DangitBobby 5y ago
  I definitely support making GPUs less attractive to miners. I'd buy a card that could be remotely disabled when usage patterns matched crypto mining if it meant I could spend MSRP on a modern card.
  • ehnto 5y ago
    Is there some practical way to delineate the two product usages that isn't arbitrary I wonder? Maybe make mining only cards more performant and affordable than consumer graphics cards, so that consumer cards will drop in price from less demand? I find it hard to believe that a use case specific device wouldn't be able to dethrone graphics cards as the better choice for miners at the right price, and it should be cheaper right? No need for all that extra graphics related componentry like visual ports etc. I know stuff like that is already on the market, but it's usually more expensive as they are from more niche manufacturing. NVidia has the scale to make a similar device more affordable I imagine.
    • randomsilence 5y ago
      You would have to saturate the market with specific mining devices. Like with bitcoin ASIC miners, the crypto mining demands have to increase to the point where using gaming graphic cards becomes unprofitable. Otherwise miners will buy the specific mining devices and the gaming devices. The problem is that Etherum was designed to resist ASIC approaches. Instead of locking cards down, Nvidia could manage the supply. They could sell their cards in cooperation with Steam: Only people with an active steam account are eligible to a new card. If their performance stats don't improve after the purchase, which means they have resold their hardware, they won't be allowed to buy another card.
      • eru 5y ago
        > If their performance stats don't improve after the purchase, which means they have resold their hardware, they won't be allowed to buy another card. And then you have people who lose their cards, or it gets damaged, or who don't want Steam, etc. It's a big can of worms.
        • randomsilence 5y ago
          Not wanting Steam is the biggest issue. They could include further shops and even individual games. There also needs to be an option for people who want to do scientific computing. Having vouchers from scientific institutions would exclude everybody who is independent. The approach has to be refined a bit, but the general principle is that you can link cards to individuals. To balance the downsides, Nvidia doesn't have to go all in on 'Steam sales', like Sony, who sells some of their PS5 to registered gamers but not all of them. On the other hand, I don't see the problem with damaged or lost cards. Damaged cards can be treated like guarantees: send in your damaged card and buy a new one. Lost cards on their own are a problem but how do you lose your card? You have to lose your entire gaming rig which most likely means that it is stolen. So send in a copy of your police report. That way, miners will be punished for wrong legal proceedings if they make a business out of 'losing cards'.
      • Mindwipe 5y ago
        > They could sell their cards in cooperation with Steam: Only people with an active steam account are eligible to a new card. If their performance stats don't improve after the purchase, which means they have resold their hardware, they won't be allowed to buy another card. I have a baby. I do anything on Steam once a month at best. Crypto miners could pretty trivially make their use cases look like they spend more time gaming than a good 30% of Steam's active user base. This is a non-starter.
        • loa_in_ 5y ago
          There are more mining rigs than people behind them, so limiting the number to number of people would be some improvement for sure
    • dspillett 5y ago
      > Is there some practical way to delineate the two product usages that isn't arbitrary I wonder? Highly unlikely. There might be reasonably reliable heuristics to identify gaming operations, but any signal for mining is likely to trigger for other long-process number-crunching too. The idea puts me in mind of the other side: the police once raided a home because surveillance via helicopter identified, from the heat pattern, the property as like to have a loft-based cannabis farm. Turned out that the loft was full of equipment running coin miners. Simple checks get significant false positives.
      • ehnto 5y ago
        Oh I meant specifically avoiding those kinds of arbitrary locks and checks, by delineate I meant make two separate product lines to cater for the two different markets. My hope would be that miners would buy the one better for mining, taking some pressure off the graphics cards for graphics market. Imagine a "3080 Mining" card that has no monitor outputs, no huge memory reserves, no extra-curricular processing units. It should be much cheaper. But perhaps miners would just buy both mining and non-mining cards, since it's not a zero sum purchase, every card added to the stack is worthwhile.
      • paulmd 5y ago
        Mining does have strong indicators though: mining memory access is nothing like memory access for a game or application. Normal games and applications won't just max the whole memory bus at 100% for hours and hours. Even in a high-load situation it will still bounce around 90-100% or whatever. Mining absolutely slams the memory bus 100%, because current implementations are Proof Of Bandwidth so that's the stat you need to maximize. Normal games or applications will go out of their way to align threads in a warp to access contiguous memory blocks ("coalesced memory access"), because that can be efficiently handled as a single request and broadcast to every thread. Mining can't do that because every thread is working in a totally different place in memory determined by the DAG. So normal applications will have lots of coalescing happening, mining will have zero. Normal games or applications will have cache hits, because they're re-using at least some data frequently. Mining will have an (effectively) 0% cache hit rate because the DAG is sending threads to random places in memory and memory is much larger than cache. These are simple things that can be metered with O(1) performance counters on the hardware. If the card sees a load like that, run in cripple mode, nuke the memory bus to 10% performance. Then you can also add the capability for a whitelist - the driver can attest that a certain binary has been signed by windows from the appropriate vendor, and TPM can attest that the driver and hardware hasn't been tampered with (Remote Attestation). So no need to worry about legacy code or DIY cuda code unless it happens to look like a mining application, and then you can whitelist any edge-cases. TPM is going to be mandatory for OEM Windows 11 systems - home builders technically don't need it, but then if they happen to run some code that performs 100% random unaligned memory access you'd have to get it signed. But most code doesn't behave anything like that, so that is a real edge-case unless you are trying to write a miner. You may be morally opposed to the above, but it's not impossible at a technical level, mining code actually looks nothing like normal code at a perfcounter level.
    • mattwilsonn888 5y ago
      Just wait. GPU mined currencies is pretty much exclusive to Ethereum which has dedicated plans to migrate away from PoW. Monero is set on PoW but uses a psuedo random mining challenge to thwart dedicated hardware and target all purpose CPUs - its targeting, not sure if its what you want.
  • eru 5y ago
    Eh, you can fix that problem much simpler: nvidia can raise MSRP.
  • zelon88 5y ago
    You would allow hardware DRM in your box just to allow Nvidia to "revoke" ownership of your card when you use it "incorrectly". Yeah I'll pass.
    • Mindwipe 5y ago
      I can see why it's attractive when the alternative is no card at all.
      • throwaway0a5e 5y ago
        The alternative is not "no card" it's "don't buy a top of the line card" Every expensive product with potential commercial use has this situation. Anything you can easily make money with has a price that reflects it. People who want stuff for limited use cannot justify those kinds of prices so they have to buy older stuff, lesser stuff or stuff that needs effort/time dumped in in order to work.
        • tsss 5y ago
          The alternative _is_ no card. Even 5 year old cards are twice the MSRP if you can get them.
      • oarsinsync 5y ago
        Short term thinking can often appear to be attractive in the short term. It's the long term implications that get you, and by then it's too late.
        • danaris 5y ago
          Allowing/supporting crypto mining is short-term thinking. It's a bunch of wealthy people burning absurd amounts of fossil fuels solely for the purpose of making themselves wealthier. There is no benefit to society from allowing this.
          • icejjfish 5y ago
  • Hendrikto 5y ago
    Crypto mining is just one of many factors driving availability down and prices up. If it disappeared tomorrow, you still would not be able to buy a GPU at MSRP.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• modeless 5y ago
  No single piece of software has wasted more of my time than Nvidia's drivers, mostly (though not exclusively) on Linux. They've rendered my OS unbootable so many times over the years. So many times I've spent whole days of my life troubleshooting, upgrading, downgrading, configuring, rebooting. Then often reinstalling the OS after their installers mess stuff up in ways that are impossible to even know until they pop up and screw you later on. I don't condone cybercrime but man would I just be ecstatic if Nvidia would finally follow AMD and Intel in developing an open source driver.
  • ActorNightly 5y ago
    A better solution would be for AMD to invest in bringing their ML stacks up to date to work with PyTorch and such.
    • modeless 5y ago
      That would be nice. It really boggles the mind how thoroughly AMD has missed the boat on ML. And it really seems like they aren't on any trajectory to catch up even today. I've given up on them. Instead I'm hoping that Intel's imminent entry into the discrete GPU market does better. Nvidia is in desperate need of some competent competition in ML.
      • qayxc 5y ago
        You seem to overlook the fact that NVIDIA poured immense resources into their ML software stack. This was back in AMD's Bulldozer days (2011), when the company struggled both financially and technologically. Meanwhile NVIDIA sponsored universities with graphics cards and had already developed their CUDA ecosystem (in 2007) when AMD was still busy with the ATI acquisition. In 2011 NVIDIA had an annual net income of about $500 million, while AMD had a net loss of $600 million at the same time and kept struggling for the following 5 years. In other words, NVIDIA already had an existing ecosystem of professional grade H/W accelerators and S/W infrastructure, when AMD was still a CPU manufacturer without a dedicated GPU division. When AMD acquired ATI, NVIDIA was already in the process of transitioning their GPGPU stack from data centre-only products to consumer hardware. AMD has powerful ML hardware today, but that's data centre and supercomputer only. They didn't miss the boat on ML - they were busy not drowning while NVIDIA was handing out goodies to academia.
• Blammar 5y ago
  I can suggest a good reason why the Nvidia GPU drivers are opaque binary blobs. Generally speaking, you don't build a multi-billion transistor chip, and manage to ship the A01 spin without doing some magic. The Nvidia GPU i/o interface is a remarkable mechanism where the resource manager (the code that sits at the very lowest level) can patch the hardware interface to get around hardware issues and give the appearance of a chip that is working perfectly. I'm not claiming the blobs work well or anything. I'm just saying there's a reason Nvidia does blobs. Typically, an A01 chip will ship with about 50 bugs that are worked around in the resource manager and driver. They really do not want to tell you about these bugs -- because they are WORKED AROUND. You don't need to see the sausage made, so to speak.
  • eru 5y ago
    Isn't that essentially the same as what everyone does with CPUs?
    • theresistor 5y ago
      GPUs ship with far more workarounds in the drivers because the programmer only has access to the hardware via drivers that can cover up the bugs, and because they’re not constrained by binary compatibility.
      • eru 5y ago
        Yes. I think for the CPU they mostly stick those work-arounds into microcode?
  • pbasista 5y ago
    I do not understand your argument. You suggest that there are work-arounds in the drivers. And then you imply that people do not want to see them. First of all, I am unsure if people not willing to see the work-arounds is generally true to begin with. But more importantly, if someone does not want to see something, they can simply not look. I do not understand how that is meant to justify these drivers being binary blobs.
• beojan 5y ago
  That or they want to remove software limits on performance to mine cryptocurrency faster.
  • EdwardDiego 5y ago
    Bingo, that's what this is.
  • breakfastduck 5y ago
    In fairness, it's hardly an outrageous view to want to remove artificial performance bottlenecks on a piece of hardware you've spent a considerable amount of money on.
    • nextlevelwizard 5y ago
      Except there is nothing "fair" about this. In all fairness these crypto-bros could buy the cards specifically made for mining, but they won't because they don't have any resale value. Only reason they are buying GPUs is that they can run it until something better comes to market and still sell it to some gamer who is actually going to use the hardware for its intended purpose. More power to Nvidia. If I could make the decision the hashrate of any cryptomining on gaming cards would be 0. Let the crypto-bros buy the crypto cards and leave the gaming cards for people who are actually going to enjoy them.
      • breakfastduck 5y ago
        I don't care what the use case is. I don't support artificial performance limitation on expensive hardware. It's as simple as that.
        • thn-gap 5y ago
          I do care when this use case is harmful. We shouldn't need to limit hardware for specific usages, but we already see that people won't stop themselves from wasting energy and accelerating world climate if this gives you more wealth and power. I'd also be up for limiting all military weapons from being so destructive across the globe for example. It's mind blowing how we managed to create so many harmful tools in such a small time span of our history. But I agree with you when the use case is actually useful for humanity.
• lmm 5y ago
  The binary driver made me a big NVidia fan FWIW. It works, consistently and easily, on both Linux and FreeBSD. The unified release makes both of those feel like a first-class citizen alongside Windows. It's always been more reliable than the ATI/AMD drivers, even when the latter are notionally open-source. (I will say that Intel video drivers have also always been good). Sure, it'd be nice for it to be open-source too, but frankly if the software is good enough that I never want to fix bugs in it then it's a lot less important whether it's open-source.
  • andi999 5y ago
    Which card do you use?
    • lmm 5y ago
      I've had several over the years; I'm currently on a GTX 1060 (this machine is getting old, but I don't game anywhere near as much as I used to, especially not AAA).
  • hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
    So long as you don’t mind getting wayland 6 years late.
    • lmm 5y ago
      I use FreeBSD now so it was however many years late for me already. And even when I was using Linux, the benefits seemed extremely marginal - like, sure, in theory I can see some situations where using two screens with different DPI settings would be useful, but it's rarely something I've wanted or needed in practice - when I got a laptop with a 4k screen I did try using it with an old 1080p monitor for a little while but it looked so bad in comparison that I replaced that with a 4k monitor as soon as I could.
      • hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
        BSD makes you a minority of a minority, so that’s probably to be expected. Afaik it offers sandboxing and a better security model, reduced screen tearing, etc. Nvidia dragging their feet has surely impacted on the early adoption of the project. It’s also created painpoonts. I’d be using fedora, but there’s no assurance on the content within the fedora community repos. I don’t really want to apply trust there, so I stick with Ubuntu for better or worse, all because of nvidia.
• mysterydip 5y ago
  Reminds me of a story where someone joined a company, then immediately fixed a bug in the code that had been bothering them for years, sighed, and put in their two weeks' notice.
  • b0afc375b5 5y ago
    I'm assuming you meant this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26663798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26663798 Comment says it's a joke, however.
• gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
  That cybercriminal’s name? Uhhh Tobias Lorvalds…
• marcosdumay 5y ago
  Personally, I just switched to AMD and never had to think about GPU drivers again. Ok, I do have to add the non-free firmware when I install Debian, once every installation. But there are no random problems all the time, no "your card is too old for your computer to keep working", no "your card is too new for your computer", basically nothing more than adding a single package. I imagine NVidia works really well on Windows, because people keep saying good things about them, and there is absolutely no chance somebody on Linux will ever say something good.
  • joshvm 5y ago
    Nvidia drivers are decent on Linux - almost all ML people use it and they're incredibly dependent on CUDA. Nvidia has a vested interest in this because they pivoted hard towards deep learning, but they're also comfortable because there's no good competition from AMD or ARM yet. TPUs are excellent but still niche, despite Google's best efforts to push them. Driver installation on Linux is mostly good I've found, just using native package managers and Conda for dev environments. Gaming also works fine and of course so does mining... But there are odd annoyances - you get less control over device parameters in Linux. Things like setting the memory clock or undervolting (not just power factor) only seem to work in Windows. This leak is a pain. If Nvidia refuses and they just leak the code, we're still dependent on Nvidia to approve an open source driver. It's like when hackers try and take code to other companies - AMD wouldn't touch any of this with a barge pole for fear of infringement. You're not going to get magical driver support in Debian from leaked code. Best case someone releases an illegal driver and it doesn't get immediately taken down.
  • opan 5y ago
    The non-free firmware is a shame. There are basically no modern GPUs that work with linux-libre because of it. This issue doesn't get much attention.