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by zmk5 1323 days ago
I'm happy to see this! Hopefully Nvidia starts open sourcing a lot more stuff.
2 comments

Indeed, nothing has changed. This is just a revision. PhysX 4 source was available here. https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/PhysX/tree/4.1/physx/sour...
PhysX has been source available since 2015 (3 clause BSD since 2018) , so I wouldn’t take this as an indicator in that regard.
right. what do you think about nvidia's recently released gpu drivers ?
I think it’s good , but doesn’t change too much unless you’re a kernel implementer.

They’ve been busy moving the vast amount of the bits into the GPU firmware (not uncommon, this is how Apple and some others do it too).

I think the FOSS crowd made a bigger deal of it than it was because it appealed to their sensibilities.

The best new OSS-ish stuff from NVidia is their research, and things backing that research. They’ve released a lot of their nerf tech in the wild and Warp (a differential Python to CUDA transpiler) which are very cool.

Not the person you're replying to, but those drivers are essentially just the communication bridge between the kernel and the "real" driver, which is mostly in the closed-source firmware blob. They're also woefully incomplete.
And only on PC and Mobile. Not on console.
Consoles and open source do not mix. NDAs prevent code using their APIs from being released.

That said, a lot of open source projects have console ports, they just can’t be shared publicly.

I've worked on many console projects that use many open source libraries and some where the part that can't be shared publicly was still source available if you were a registered developer. Not disagreeing with you just sharing some info for others.
Steam Deck is in disagreement.
Steam Deck isn’t a console in any traditional sense unless we’re just going to start butchering decades of colloquial nomenclature . It’s a portable PC running desktop software from top down. Otherwise you might as well call my laptop running Steam Big Picture a console too.

When the other people are talking about consoles, any sensible person knows they mean things like the PlayStation, Xbox or Switch.

So the key distinguishing attribute that makes a "game console" a "game console" is its walled-garden nature? Nothing else?

And not the fact that it's, you know, a "console" that can be used to play "games"?

Playstation is a PC with extra lockdown. So is Xbox. The Switch is similar hardware to Nvidia Shield, which is just another general computer (it can run Nvidia's version of Ubuntu).

So the differentiator these days seems to be running custom software.

Which Steam Deck is also running.

The remaining difference is "console = extra lockdown". That might be a good definition in general, but doesn't make sense in the context of the original post

> And only on PC and Mobile. Not on console.