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AMD and Intel both have open source video drivers and I really doubt anyone has cloned them. The non-free features for the Nvidia cards and many other chips ar

AMD and Intel both have open source video drivers and I really doubt anyone has cloned them. The non-free features for the Nvidia cards and many other chips are achieved by the card itself running closed source binaries. It is actually probably a better way to protect IP anyway since no one can decompile the encrypted binary (well until recently...). Open source and proprietary software exist as a duality. It's not an absolute expectation that everything will be open source but Nvidia is very late vs its competitors. Google, Windows, macOS, etc. all have large open source parts. Games are kind of an exception because they are treated like a single work of art. Also, crucially no other software or hardware has a game as a dependency so interoperability isn't a concern.

native_samples 4y ago
AMD and Intel aren't (or weren't at least) shipping cutting edge GPU tech so there's less need to look to them for ideas and shortcuts anyway. Well I used to work at Google and the open source parts are a tiny, tiny fraction of their actual codebase. Windows isn't really open source at all, although in recent years a few utilities have been opened up - note, only after Windows stopped being so important to Microsoft. And as for macOS. Well. You can download and read some code, sometimes. Good luck trying to actually build it or do anything useful with it at all. You'll find that it's (a) completely undocumented and (b) all depends on internal stuff you don't have access to. An exception is WebKit.