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Comment by lone_haxx0r | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, Nvidia's Linux drivers are blobs (that don't even support Wayland) while AMD and Intel actively contribute to Mesa, and treat their users well (or at least much better than nvidia).

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I look forward to the day that someone pulls the rug from under Nvidia like AMD did to Intel.

I'm not sure if it will happen, or when, but damn would it be satisfying.

There have been numerous situations just this year where I've stumbled on problem from having an AMD card, whereas Nvidias with their "blobs" have worked just fine. Gaming, video editing, even ML, they all seem to work perfectly on Linux with Nvidia, and AMD always has some problems. So at the very least this is contested. Nvidia seems much more supporting of the open source OS.

My experience in research taught me that NVidia makes a hostage-like situation. CUDA being a standard, it locked us into the proprietary driver, and overly expensive GPUs (or struggling to source used Titans) for double-precision computation. AMD stack not supporting CUDA at the time, their more powerful cheap double-precision GPUs felt like a forbidden fruit.

To top this off, the proprietary driver gave us permanent issues with OS integration, testing and deployment, and being distributed out of band, it was really difficult to get every developer on the same version. Each version of the GPU compiler had different and conflicting quirks, increasing the chaos of which developer/researcher used which branch of our software.

I would not recommend tying any serious work to NVidia hardware to any team.

You don't have a laptop with a nvidia optimus card, do you? It's a shitshow of never ending problems with nvidia, while every amd laptop solution works as intended instantly after os installation.

I have had exactly the opposite experience, issues with Nvidia cards / drivers that I couldn't fix. Over the last 5~10 years AMD support on Linux (and other open source OSes) have been much better. To the point that for some of my workloads AMD on Linux is faster than AMD on Windows.

It is not surprising, AMD OpenGL drivers for Windows are horribly slow.

There is one advantage of nvidia proprietary driver, you get support of new cards on day one, with amd/intel it takes few months to have drivers in good shape.

I'm pretty sure amdgpu has supported AMD's recent cards (from the past few years) before they hit the shelves. Same for intel. It's always fun seeing the commits adding support for chips that you can't buy yet. And I've bought some very bleeding edge hardware from both companies in the past few years, with good results OOTB on Linux.

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