2 ms·
nVidia built this bubble by playing dirty on many fronts. Their Windows drivers are a black box which doesn't conform to many of the standards, or behave the w
by bayindirh 2y ago
nVidia built this bubble by playing dirty on many fronts.
Their Windows drivers are a black box which doesn't conform to many of the standards, or behave the way they see fit, esp. about memory management and data transfers. GameWorks library actively sabotaged AMD cards (not unlike Intel's infamous compiler saga). Many nVidia optimized games either ran on completely unoptimized or outright AMD/ATI hostile code-paths. e.g.: GTA3 ran silky smooth on an nVidia Geforce MX400 (bottom of the barrel card) while thrice powerful ATI cards stuttered. Only a handful of studios (kudos to Valve) optimized engines for both and showed that a "paltry" 9600XT can do HDR@60FPS.
On Datacenter front, they actively undermined OpenCL and other engine by aritifically performance-capping them (you can use only one DMA controller in Tesla cards, which actually have three DMA engines), slowing down memory transfers and removing ability to stream in/out of the card. They "supported" versions of OpenCL, but made it impossible to compile on their hardware, except OpenCL 1.1.
On driver front, they have a signed firmware mechanism, and they provide a seriously limited firmware to nouveau just to enable their hardware. You can't use any advanced features of their cards, because the full-capability firmware refuses to work with nouveau. Also, they re not opening their kernel module. Secret sauce is moving to firmware, leaving an open interfacing module. CUDA, GL and everything is closed source.
On the other hand, they actively said that "The docs of the cards are in the open. We neither help, nor sabotage nouveau driver project. They're free", while cooking a limited firmware for these guys.
They bought Mellanox, the sole infiniband supplier to vertically integrate. Wonder how they will cripple the IB stack with licenses and such now.
They're the Microsoft of hardware world. They're greedy, and don't hesitate to make dirty moves to dominate the market. Because of what they did, I neither respect nor like them.