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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 man

• 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.
      • modeless 5y ago
        It's been obvious for 10+ years now that AI was not only incredibly important but also a ginormous market opportunity up for grabs. To the extent that they were cash strapped they should have reprioritized. The effort would have paid for itself many times over. And that excuse no longer holds water now that AMD's market cap rivals Intel's and they're still not investing enough or making the right technical decisions. There must be deeper problems.
      • paulmd 5y ago
        Yeah, there was a lot of poor management from AMD though that led to them being in that situation, let's not pretend like it's just one day "oops we have no money". (And nor was it "all Intel's fault" either, AMD fucked up a lot in this time period, both technically and in their business decisions) At one point AMD was set to merge with NVIDIA but the board couldn't get over the sticking point of Jensen wanting to be CEO of the resulting company. Had the board swallowed their pride and let that happen, I doubt he would have led the company down the Bulldozer garden path. Instead AMD said no, and then way overpaid for ATI, which depleted their cash reserves and forced them to sell their foundries (which was ultimately probably the correct long-term move, but that isn't the proximate reason why they sold them - they were just out of cash at the time). Then they had no money and had to underfund their architectures, and move to "cost reduction" mechanisms in the design and implementation, and had a series of implementation problems and poor designs. Phenom was late (so much so that AMD had to put out a stopgap dual-socket "Quad FX" system just to try and compete against Core2 Quad) and Phenom had a major bug where part of the cache system had to be turned off, tanking performance by like >25%. And by the time Phenom II came out, AMD was putting non-SMT quadcores against Nehalem. By the time Bulldozer came out, the 8150 was going against Sandy Bridge, and by the time AMD fixed the worst of Bulldozer's performance problems, the 8350 was going against Ivy Bridge, and it still sucked anyway. AMD just executed extremely poorly in this period and a large part of that is the cash shortages resulting from buying ATI. The next decade of AMD's financial woes largely spring from that moment when the AMD board said "no" to the merger, and the chain of decisions and failures that resulted. And while consoles might have saved the company - they likely would not have been in that position in the first place had they said yes to the merger instead of emptying the bank account to buy ATI, instead of doing a merger-of-equals with NVIDIA. Also, AMD still isn't taking the steps that they can to increase their ML marketshare. They are actively reducing the support levels of their ROCm package - amateurs can easily get into the basics with a consumer NVIDIA gaming GPU while AMD forces you to buy a $5000 enterprise card.
  • catfishx 5y ago
    Yes, it would also nice if they would implement stuff like CUDA (if thats not illegal) or provide alternatives, which is also used by many ML programs and forces you to buy a Nvidia card
    • qayxc 5y ago
      They have ROCm and many popular frameworks support it. The problem is that NVIDIA has 100% of the mindshare and owns 97% of the dGPU market so it's a self-fullfilling prophecy that proprietary tech like CUDA will stay dominant in the foreseeable future. Hopefully Intel re-entering the dGPU market will put a dent in that and move the needle a little.
  • deathcakes 5y ago
    They actually have already - PyTorch works straight up with ROCm, and so does Tensorflow. There is a little faffing to do to get it to work but they've made great progress in the last six months.
    • zucker42 5y ago
      Except consumer GPUs don't officially support ROCm, despite consistent pressure from users for years. And there's no indication of when that situation will change. CUDA is successful because the same software works on low-powered laptop GPUs and expensive datacenter GPUs.
• deehouie 5y ago
  I used to cringe whenever I see a prompt to upgrade driver. But it's getting better. Version 460.39 hasn't caused any pain so far.
  • GrumpyNl 5y ago
    Just look at the version number, 460.39.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• mrtksn 5y ago
  Oh, tell me about it. +Installs Linux, this time determined to make it daily driver. Why is this so slow though? - You need to install Nvidia drivers + Oh, OK makes sense. -- INSTALLS NVIDIA DRIVERS -- -- LINUX NO LONGER BOOTS, OBSCURE ERROR MESSAGE, FURIOUSLY GOOGLING ON A TINY PHONE SCREEN TRYING TO RESOLVE THE ISSUE -- Later made myself a Hackintosh, eventually bought an actual Mac. The Hackintosh stuff was much, much more stable than anything Nvidia ever released when I was trying to use Linux. Installing patched kext files, trying make MacOS run at full resolution and with smooth animations on unsupported hardware was much less pain than dealing with official Nvidia drives on Linux. It's sad to hear that graphics drivers are still not a solved problem on Linux.
  • pjerem 5y ago
    Interesting. I’ve not used Linux as my mainly driver for years. I miss it and I want to come back but I basically don’t have any decent PC anymore so I have the freedom to get/build one. When I used it, ironically, NVidia was the way to go on Linux and ATI/AMD was a shit show. Is AMD ok nowadays ? My needs are mostly confortable casual gaming where I don’t care having more than 60fps and I don’t play online (so this anti cheats situation doesn’t really bother me other than ideological issues).
    • modeless 5y ago
      Despite my complaints, for casual gaming on a desktop you shouldn't have too many issues with Nvidia's drivers these days as long as you can use the ones packaged by your distro instead of Nvidia's installer. My troubles have mostly been associated with laptops that have both Intel and Nvidia graphics, or desktops used for ML training where the distro-packaged drivers wouldn't work for one reason or another. I've heard AMD's drivers are OK these days but haven't tried them myself because I care about ML.
      • ChuckNorris89 5y ago
        >I've heard AMD's drivers are OK these days but haven't tried them myself because I care about ML. They are OK but with some caveats like VP9 HW decode not being available in Linux AMD iGPU drivers for reasons, which won't be a problem if you're running an AMD desktop tower PC, but if you're gonna watch Youtube on your AMD laptop, your battery will take a hit along with possible extra fan noise, which is unacceptable for a great media content consumption experience in Linux when even no-name Android phones and tablets have VP9 HW decode in Youtube out of the box. No bueno. This is such a mess, as VP9 & AV1 HW video decode is not an issue under linux for Intel iGPUs, but AMD seems to not give a shit to expose VP9 decode on linux for their iGPUs. Also, unlike with Intel iGPUs, under linux, radeon-top does not show GPU decode usage for easy diagnostic purposes. I assume it's because AMD bought the video codec engine IP from some third party fabless IP vendor and they don't have the permission to open source the drivers for the video engine block as part of the licensing agreement, like they do for their in house developed GPU block. But still, regardless of the reason, it sucks for the linux end-users. And another important issue nobody seems to talk about but one should be aware of, AMD APUs (at least to 5000 series) don't have unified memory between CPU and iGPU like Intel and Apple do, so you have to configure in your laptop BIOS how much of your system RAM you want allocated to your iGPU (512MB/1GB/2GB/4GB), with the rest remaining for the CPU. This sucks big time if you're switching between productivity where you need more memory for applications, and playing video games where you need as much memory as possible for the GPU, so you need to keep rebooting and changing in the BIOS the amount of memory you allocate to your iGPU, vs on Intel chips where the whole system memory is unified and shared dynamically between the CPU and iGPU, and it boils my blood as the whole marketing gimmick of AMD's APUs was the seamless merger between CPU and GPU resources together, while in practice their (5000 series) APUs are just a Ryzen CPU with a Vega GPU glued on the same die without them actually sharing any of the resources properly. Maybe the new 6000 series with RDNA2 changed that but I couldn't find any detailed info. Honestly, as a laptop owner with AMD APU, if you're planning to go Linux, just get one with an Intel chip instead. Much less head aches as Intel Linux drivers and apps are second to none and have a unified memory model. The performance and efficiency of AMD APUs is still great though, especially under Windows, but the overall implementation as a whole package seems poorly thought out and rushed out the door, especially under Linux compared to Intel.
• darawk 5y ago
  Same, glad to know i'm not the only one that deal with this.
• saurik 5y ago
  Linus Torvalds directly addressing NVIDIA (worth the click: it's only 17 seconds): https://youtu.be/_36yNWw_07g https://youtu.be/_36yNWw_07g
  • LoveMortuus 5y ago
    Is it the video that I think it is? Yeah it is~ ^^
    • teekert 5y ago
      Nvidia license taints kernel.
• Tetilio 5y ago
  Is t there a ton of IP and patents which can't be made open source? There should not be much of an issue for Nvidia to open source it otherwise. Open source doesn't mean free anyway
  • sjmm1989 5y ago
    It's not about making it 'free' in the sense of money. The term free often infers money, but in this regards its more about the philosophy of freedom itself, not cost of product. We as consumers should not be held back from using hardware the way that we intend to use it. Nvidia does not have any right to hinder us from using what we purchased how we see fit. (Provided that we are not infringing upon copyrights and/or I.P.)
  • paulmd 5y ago
    yes, that's always been the primary underlying reason AFAIK, there's too much licensed code involved in their driver stack, and they don't care to spend the time re-implementing those components.
    • sjmm1989 5y ago
      Ironically, they wouldn't need to spend the time re-implementing those componenents and dealing with licenses if they had just made their code open source to begin with. The community would likely gladly help them with anything we can help with; and licenses would be less of an issue. It wouldn't be the first time closed source stuff has been made alternatives to it in open source specifically for reasons like licensing. MP3 for instance... not a terribly hard thing to deal with anymore, but once upon a time ago.. Anyways. Nvidia's true reason for doing anything is ultimately in their namesake. They want people to be envious. Part of making people envious is to keep things they want away from them. So, yeah... that's the real reason. If they actually gave a flying fuck about the rest of us, they wouldn't be that way.
• ThatMedicIsASpy 5y ago
  I recently tried wayland with fedora 35. The driver destroyed the system. I switched back from pop os lts to the latest pop os and the performance was even better (compared to lts). GTX 1080
• jstanley 5y ago
  Why don't you just not buy Nvidia hardware?
  • modeless 5y ago
    Because I care about ML which AMD has been utterly failing at for 10 years running.
• lewispollard 5y ago
  Haven't had an issue with the nvidia proprietary drivers since the 495 series, they've gotten a lot better recently, and more frequently updated, though still less configurable than their windows counterparts. Currently on driver 510.54 and playing Elden Ring on maximum settings with a 2080 super without issue. Though you do have to add a kernel parameter to use nvidia's DRM mode for best performance which is non-obvious. And hybrid GPU laptops are a whole other thing, I guess.
• Accacin 5y ago
  Yeah. It directly led me to buying AMD hardware this time and I'm much happier for it. AMD aren't perfect but at least their drivers are in the kernel.
• ihateolives 5y ago
  > No single piece of software has wasted more of my time than Nvidia's drivers I see you haven't used printers much :)
  • moffkalast 5y ago
    Or tried to install tensorflow ayoo
    • NavinF 5y ago
      Eh it’s not too bad on Linux as long as you use the official docker image that has cuda, cudnn, and tensorflow with matching versions. This also lets you use tf1, tf2, and PyTorch in separate containers without upgrading cudnn in lockstep. Larger projects that use several models inevitably require all three. If you install it yourself, you’re in for a world of hurt.
      • hanselot 5y ago
        I don't understand how anyone can be okay with: "Here, run this piece of code. No don't bother trying to read, build or understand it yourself, we know you won't be able to do it, so we put it in a little mystery box over here that you can run on top of your existing operating system. Now please don't ask any questions and go away."
        • NavinF 5y ago
          Vouched, but you should know that literally all the comments on your account are [dead]. I can read and understand tf just fine and I’ve had to work around bugs (like the broken image resampling) by doing just that. Treating tf as a blank box has nothing to do with it. The problem is that nothing none of the ABIs involved here (tf, cudnn, distro libc, nvidia driver, etc) are stable. The best you can hope for is to use the same driver for several containers with matched (tf, libc, cudnn) and that’s worked out well for me in the last couple of years.
        • moffkalast 5y ago
• therealunreal 5y ago
  Same here, I got fed up with it and went AMD (or Intel) only. It just works.
• dan-0 5y ago
  This was the single biggest "driver" to me moving to Mac from Linux. I had a really nice system that I built and used for work. I was working on a project with a 24 hour requirement, it was only an hour of work. I needed to update for a particular dependency, but decided to update everything and low and behold, my video output broke after the update. I made the deadline, but spent literally all day and night trying to get everything working and done. The next day after a long nap, I shelved what should have been a perfectly good piece of hardware and bought a Mac after using Linux for well over a decade.
  • fritzo 5y ago
    > but decided to update everything We each make that mistake once ;)
  • bombcar 5y ago
    This is basically what happened to me, though twenty years ago. Since then linux has been great for me - on the servers.
  • kinnth 5y ago
    Do you now love or loathe your mac and it's cost?
    • bjelkeman-again 5y ago
      I am not dan-0, I like my Macs, I used to love them, but software quality has gone down. Weird UI decisions, mostly around size, colours (all friggen grey!) and contrast were the older I get the harder it gets to use in default setup. The cost of them are really a bit of a challenge now. A Mac Mini with 16 Gb ram and 2 TB SSD for $1600 is a bit much. And the Pro is just eye watering. Windows is out of the question in how they treat their customers. Example: Dialogue when rejecting upgrading to Win10, click the X button at the dialog upper right corner and be greeted by an immediate reboot and upgrade. Linux, life is to short for me to handle the hassle on the desktop. Server is a no brainer.
  • miloignis 5y ago
    This is similarly perhaps my single biggest reason for using the NixOS disto instead of Arch. If one big update breaks everything, rolling back is as simple as choosing the older state from the boot menu and voila. It's helped me sleep so much better with updates both on my personal computers and my server, to know I'm not going to bring it down for more than a minute or two even with a failed update.
• funstuff007 5y ago
  seriously, nothing makes me feel more inept that wrestling with a new GPU.
• charwalker 5y ago
  Printer Drivers, but those are not brand specific, take the cake here.