[paulmd]

> 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)

[shmerl]

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.

[wmf]

AFAIK a lot of Hollywood visual effects are done on Linux + Nvidia so they probably support that market.

[shmerl]

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.

[p_l]

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).

[shmerl]

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.

[p_l]

For the targeted use case, their drivers tended to work just fine.

It was when you went outside said use case that things started getting worse, and you had to wait long time for fixes. Sometimes it was because the changes in XFree/X.Org were effectively fixated on how some other vendors did things (cough intel cough), or involved things that effectively nobody wanted to spend engineering to fix properly (like rebuilding rendering path to be able to handle hybrid graphics properly when hybrid graphics came into world years after critical set of X.Org devs decided to stop any real development into X.Org...).

Vulkan Compute also is nowhere close to feature parity with CUDA, so not sure it would be picked up instead.