You will waste time.
To be clear, “hostility” is not the word I would’ve chosen, as it attributes emotions to entities that don’t really experience them. Perhaps it’s more useful to talk about whether the company cares if the customers feel exploited or not; and I don’t think Nvidia does (think this will hurt their sales).
Which... sorry to inject my personal opinion here, but it's not. Software is a finite intellectual product designed by motivated human laborers. The hardware can be a commodity, and the design can be a competitive advantage, but software layer is specifically what people consider "monopolized".
Nvidia is not the only company designing GPGPU hardware, and they're not the only company capable of affording commodity silicon from TSMC. The only high-demand thing they entirely control seems to be CUDA, a software feature other companies are too lazy to reproduce. Maybe it's the rest of the market that's being anticompetitive?
On linux they are simply not true.
So are we talking about Windows? Are we talking games?
I also play a few dozen hours of games a month, some new, some old, some AAA, some indie. All through Steam's Proton with no driver issues whatsoever.
But all I'm doing is warning. The consensus viewpoint is not this so you can listen to HN consensus or you can listen to me.
Can you corroborate your points? None of it really aligns with my experience. Nvidia hardware seems quite popular and effective for raster solutions, accelerated RT, dedicated AI and even low-power handheld gaming. I'm typing this out on a Linux box with an Nvidia GPU right now :P
It's worth noting that Nvidia isn't a saint, sure. They play for keeps, and CUDA is limited to paying customers only. CUDA doesn't have open source alternatives, though. Some things do part of what CUDA does really well (or better), but nobody is making a full-stack replacement. Apple is investing in the Accelerate framework which has almost no industry/datacenter application; AMD is doubling down on OpenBLAS and community support. Intel is half-assing some proprietary frameworks and pushing it into demos for a good look.
It would be great if these incumbent companies would pool their vast resource advantage to write, deliver, test and maintain a cross-platform GPGPU library. But that's a lot to ask, and it's easier to just disrupt the entire market with a single integrated package.
My understanding is the likes of oneAPI is supposed to be enable non nvidia gpus to work on CUDA workloads? Is oneAPI one of your these proprietary frameworks?
I just bought a 4090 and the desktop experience I get is much worse than what I had with the gpu embeded in the Ryzen 7950x: Wayland doesn't work, in Xorg there is tearing in mpv, alt-tab sometimes breaks in gnome. When I launch memory intensive cuda kernels the whole desktop becomes unresponsive. The drivers spews Xid errors in dmesg and breaks for certain applications, such as embergen.
Still, my main complaint is that moving windows around and so on is not smooth. I forget what the term for it is… the window gets jagged and it’s like parts of it are moving at different speeds.
Since then I am on AMD. I game, I build games, work on GPU related stuff.
I refuse to buy Nvidia until they open source their drivers.
I don't care about windows, I am on linux solely and there, from my experience, AMD is doing an excellent job
In 2011 I was using R600, without any problems. Since then the situation improved steadily, especially when Steam got native support.
so you don't use linux
The ROCM drivers are shit. They somehow manage to get an enormous edifice of effort 99% working, then they bungle their package repository. Repeatedly. AMD have a tremendous ability to shoot themselves in the foot five feet from the end of the race, and the thing is, at this point you have to anticipate it. They have the capability to succeed, but not the temperament.
You do realise llama.cpp works on some and cards right?