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>"We decided to help mining and gaming community," I don't understand how this demand helps the gaming community. Wouldn't this drive up the crypto-motivated d
by httpz 5y ago
>"We decided to help mining and gaming community,"
I don't understand how this demand helps the gaming community. Wouldn't this drive up the crypto-motivated demand for GPUs even more and hurt the gaming community?
- Godel_unicode 5y agoI think the argument is that driver source being open could help the (tiny!) Linux gaming community, but I agree. This is about mining.
- 0xedd 5y agoPercentage wise it looks small but numbers are impressive. Monthly active steam users using Linux was reported at over 1 million last year https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/ https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/
- modeless 5y agoThat will easily double in the next year with the release of the $399 Steam Deck and accompanying Proton and Steam improvements. Linux is finally about to become a serious gaming platform. (No thanks to Nvidia)
- akvadrako 5y agoSteam deck uses AMD GPUs though, so this wouldn't help.
- modeless 5y agoBut the improvements Valve is making to Steam, Proton, and other areas along with game developers paying more attention to Linux compatibility will benefit all Linux users, not just Steam Deck users, and make Linux a more popular gaming platform even among people with Nvidia PCs. Yesterday I installed Steam on my Linux machine and downloaded a random game that has no Linux port and played it. It worked perfectly, just like Windows. It was amazing.
- akvadrako 5y agoHow is that relevant to Nvidia GPU source code?
- paulmd 5y agoit absolutely cannot, because no official developer is going near this with a 10,000 foot pole. https://nitter.eu/_Lyude/status/1498811646697000961 https://nitter.eu/_Lyude/status/1498811646697000961
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hungryforcodes 5y agoJust sell more GPUs. Nvidia makes more money. We get more and better GPUs. I'm not sure how this is bad.
- Godel_unicode 5y agoSo I take it you haven't tried to buy a 30-series GPU for gaming, then. It's impossible*, and that's because of mining*. * Yeah, yeah, I know, supply chain this and pandemic demand that, but it's really mining that's the culprit.
- hungryforcodes 5y agoNvida should be able to meet market demand. You just don't like crypto maybe. If Tesla was out of Models 3s you would blame...? Or correctly assess that Tesla should ramp up production.
- TheCowboy 5y agoYou realize it's not simple to just build the chip production facilities to facilitate this? It requires major capital investment and planning. Looks like you also missed that the chip shortage is affecting automobiles. Many articles exist that can explain better than I can about why this isn't a quickly resolved issue.
- leereeves 5y agoIt's not a supply issue. By design, proof of work requires even more resources as more resources are spent on it. One might say that it expands to consume all available supply. Because of that, no matter how many cards Nvidia makes, crypto miners will want them all, as long as there is money to be made in crypto.
- Siira 5y ago
- Pelam 5y agoFor a long lists of reasons; I don’t like DRMesque features like LHR and don’t like the crypto craze. (And to be clear, cyber-extortion is clearly a criminal activity.) BUT, I think the ”helping gamers” sounds a bit hollow.
- gambiting 5y agoWhat long list of reasons? LHR has absolutely zero impact on games. If anything, its presence was helping gamers because miners were at least somewhat put off buying LHR GPUs, making them more available to gamers.
- 0xedd 5y ago"You don't own your hardware" is a very long list in my book.
- stingraycharles 5y agoThat isn’t anything game-specific, rather something that applies to anyone who bought an NVidia card.
- gambiting 5y agoBy that metric you never did, and LHR doesn't change anything here. It's just yet another out of million optimizations baked into the drivers already, except this one is on BIOS level.
- franga2000 5y agoEver heard of Code 43? Or the dozens of other software locks nvidia uses to be able to sell you essentially the same silicon at 4 wildly different price points? You never owned it and you won't now.
- forgetfulness 5y agoThey were trying to make their products less attractive to people who were buying out their traditional customers. You aren't even going to own a GPU if they were all hoarded by "crypto" miners.
- heavyset_go 5y ago> I don't understand how this demand helps the gaming community. It doesn't. This is just miners co-opting an old argument to gain sympathy.
- 3836293648 5y agoEh, it absolutely helps the Linux gaming community. Not so much the Windows one though
- franga2000 5y agoRemoving LHR doesn't help Linux gamers at all. What would help is if they leaked the source code so people could patch nvidia's shitty drivers.
- azinman2 5y agoExcept no one professional would touch the leaked source with a 10 ft poll. Expect continued clean room reverse engineering or get sued.
- pabs3 5y agoDevelopers of the open source nouveau driver for nvidia GPUs certainly won't: https://nitter.eu/_Lyude/status/1498811646697000961 https://nitter.eu/_Lyude/status/1498811646697000961
- NavinF 5y agoI honestly don’t care about nouveau. It’s a fine project, but as a user I know it as the preinstalled software that cripples my servers until I install the proprietary drivers. If nvidia releases the drivers as source-available rather than open source that would still be incredibly useful since you can distribute patches. Their drivers are still missing basic features like fan speed control on headless machines.
- ckastner 5y ago> I don't understand how this demand helps the gaming community. Agreed. But I don't understand how this helps the mining community, either. Removing the LHR restriction would lead to a vast increase of the network hash rate, and consequently the difficulty would also increase, leading to lower rewards. The result would be that (1) non-LHR card owner's rewards go down significantly, and (2) LHR card owner's rewards probably wouldn't change much, perhaps even go down as well. At least 80% of Nvidia GeForce cards sold since Summer 2021 have been LHR. That's a lot of hashing power locked up.
- jart 5y agoYes, but no. The ransomers probably invested a considerable sum buying up every last used LHR card beforehand, so they'd stand to gain if Nvidia changed their policy. That's likely how they'll get caught.
- ckastner 5y agoIf they had tons of LHR cards and the code to unlock them, the last thing they would do is share the unlock code with others (= the competition).
- jart 5y agoIt's not like typing in a Faxanadu code. The ransomers are sitting on a mess of confidential information they lifted from Nvidia and they likely have zero clue how it all works. Keeping it to themselves was probably the original plan, but once they got a taste for how tragic engineering is behind the curtain their only chance for recuperating the investment became (1) forcing Nvidia to write the driver update for them; or (2) leak it and hope some open source developer volunteers.
- uncomputation 5y agoYep, it’s the red queen’s race problem. If LHR is lifted, your hash rate will rise, but so will everyone else’s, so you are either (1) no better off or (2) worse off because other people may use this increased efficiency per chip to buy more chips, thus increasing their hash power proportionally. No one will ever decrease their hash power.
- pizza234 5y agoThe article is confusing. It has conflicting information (the hacker group seems to have released conflicting statements). First, it's about LHR only. > We want nvidia to push an update for all 30 series firmware that remove every lhr limitations otherwise we will leak hw folder. If they remove the lhr we will forget about hw folder (it's a big folder). We both know lhr impact mining and gaming Later, it becomes about entirely open sourcing the drivers: > 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 secrets... well, secret
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]