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by shmerl 720 days ago
> For like 8 years their drivers on Linux were a nightmare and AMD could have come in and done better.

AMD eventually did while Nvidia's drivers remained a nightmare almost until these days. But sure, AMD could have done it sooner.
1 comments
paulmd 720 days ago
> AMD eventually did while Nvidia's drivers remained a nightmare

and yet that trillion-dollar valuation built over the last decade is built with customers almost entirely running on those "nightmare" linux drivers, while AMD's linux drivers crash running the sample app on supported hardware+OS, and nobody at AMD cared until finally a tech-bro with a loud enough platform shamed them into fixing it...

... and this is something like AMD's third crack at the apple, and the first three sets of drivers (one of which is literally a Vulkan-branded spec) are just as non-functional today as rocm was a year ago.

(OpenCL, Fusion HSA/AMD APP, Vulkan Compute/SPIR-V... all still broken so badly that Octane called them out for being unable to successfully compile their renderer and for lack of vendor support, so badly that Blender pulled support after years of turbulent and poorly-performing attempts to work with AMD, etc)

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shmerl 720 days ago
Nvidia only cares about a specific market. I.e. it doesn't care about desktop users. That's what I was talking about. So despite their pools of cash, Nvidia is a trash company when it comes to Linux support.
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wmf 719 days ago
AFAIK a lot of Hollywood visual effects are done on Linux + Nvidia so they probably support that market.
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shmerl 719 days ago
Not really familiar with it, but hopefully they can get unstuck from Nvidia, especially on Linux. Only very recently things started improving it seems and not even with Nvidia's effort but outside community working on nova + nvk.
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p_l 719 days ago
nvidia linux drivers efforts were pretty much always driven by that market, it's not getting unstuck because it's supported well.

Hell, nvidia drivers might be often complained about, but for years I would take nvidia because the crappiness was manageable and close to nothing if you were in the target market (desktop workstations running X11 on only nvidia GPUs? The only issue was if you were running super latest kernel).

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shmerl 718 days ago
Half baked support that fixes major issues at the rate of once per decade can hardly be called well. I would stay away from such garbage when possible.

Now that tools like Blender and the like are increasingly picking up Vulkan support, there is no reason for the above to use Nvidia anymore.

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