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by jjoonathan 1881 days ago
NVIDIA tends to be good (in an evil way) at proprietary lock-in, but they also tend to be good (in a genuine way) at making better thought-out and more advanced APIs. What's the balance of these two qualities in EGLStreams (as compared to GBM)?
1 comments
ZeroCool2u 1881 days ago
I've looked into this myself before, because I was curious and had the same thought as you. I don't feel comfortable making any detailed claims about GBM vs EGLStreams and which is better, but I will say there are absolutely some tradeoffs between the two and neither is entirely without merit.

The thing that is worth noting is how this situation came to be. That is, there was at one point a conference where the community invited AMD, Intel, and NVidia to discuss the future of this API and Nvidia was a no show for some reason. Those who showed ended up producing GBM, Nvidia pulled EGLStreams out of a hat, and the rest is history.

Who knows, maybe it was something as simple as scheduling and the people at Nvidia that needed to be there couldn't make it? Maybe in another timeline this mess could have been avoided entirely.

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akoncius 1881 days ago
linux development is one of those areas where physical absence is not required in order to participate in discussion and to collaborate with other participants, so it sounds to me more like excuse rather than proper explanation why nvidia decided to go another route :)
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jjoonathan 1880 days ago
Yes, but there is an argument to be had that sole ownership and lack of design-by-committee is exactly why NVIDIA can put out better APIs.

Money and proximity to hardware development would be the competing factors, and normally I'd like to pin the attribution on them, but there's just one small problem: I've been on a bunch of committees and they have pushed my estimation of typical committee dysfunction to extraordinary levels.

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