[jylam]

Having worked (very) closely on GPU firmwares and drivers, I always find it funny that it is still something so closely guarded and protected. Honestly there isn't much to it. That's fairly regular code, not like futuristic algorithms. You won't find any novel rasterizing code or ways to order your commands or whatever, 99% of the interesting work is done by the GPU. You'll find basic or vaguely clever code to order lists and optimize the order of the commands, but that's it.

I'm 95% sure that if AMD released their firmware and/or their drivers source code, NVidia wouldn't learn anything of value, they wrote the same stuff anyway. That's just sad \o/

[gary_0]

This is really just the modern patent regime at work, isn't it? Any random problem a chip company SE or EE can solve in an afternoon can get that solution whisked past an overworked patent examiner. Now open-sourcing your basic code to "optimize the order of the commands" opens your company up to a hojillion-dollar lawsuit from a patent troll or any competitor that feels like going nuclear. Maybe the patent is BS but it'll take a multi-million-dollar lawsuit to prove it.

It might not even be realistic that some jerk is going to search through 10 million lines of driver code looking for patent violations, but these are corporations we're talking about. They're twitchy when it comes to risk. So the source of insanity here is the broken patent system, isn't it? (I agree that while you get to write vaguely clever code, even specialized software dev is 99% perspiration.)

[sillywalk]

I'm old enough to remember the Open Graphics Project, to create at least initially an FPGA graphics card, and use the money to make an ASIC.

It died ~2011

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Graphics_Project