Nvidias GPUs are theoretically fast on initial benchmarks. But that’s mostly optimization by others for Nvidia? That’s it.
Everything Nvidia has done is a pain. Closed-source drivers (old pain), out of tree-drivers (new pain), ignoring (or actively harming) Wayland (everyone handles implicit sync well, except Nvidia which required explicit sync[1]), and awkward driver bugs declared as “it is not a bug, it is a feature”. The infamous bug:
This extension provides a way for applications to discover when video
memory content has been lost, so that the application can re-populate
the video memory content as necessary.
https://registry.khronos.org/OpenGL/extensions/NV/NV_robustn...This extension will be soon ten years old. At least they intend to fix it? They just didn’t in the past 9 years! Basically, video memory could be gone after Suspend/Resume, VT-Switch and so on. The good news is, after years someone figured that out and implemented a workaround. For X11 with GNOME:
https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Ubuntu-2025-SnR
I hope in the meantime somebody implemented a patch for Wayland.
What we need? Reliability. And Linux support. That’s why I purchase AMD. And previously Intel.
[1] I don’t judge whether implicit sync or explicit are better.
What I mean is that whenever NVIDIA removed features from their "consumer" GPUs in order to reduce production costs and increase profits, AMD immediately followed them, instead of attempting to offer GPUs that have something that NVIDIA does not have.
Intel at least tries to be a real competitor, e.g. by offering much, much better FP64 performance or by offering more memory.
If Intel's discrete GPUs disappear, there will be no competition in consumer GPUs, as AMD tries to compete only in "datacenter" GPUs. I have ancient AMD GPUs that I cannot upgrade to newer AMD GPUs, because the newer GPUs are worse, not better (for computational applications; I do not care about games), while Intel offers acceptable substitutes, due to excellent performance per $.
Moreover, NVIDIA also had excellent Linux driver support for more than 2 decades, not only for games, but also for professional graphics applications (i.e. much better OpenGL support than AMD) and for GPU computing applications (i.e. CUDA). AMD gets bonus points for open-source drivers and much more complete documentation, but the quality of their drivers has been typically significantly worse.
NVIDIA always had good support even for FreeBSD, where I had to buy discrete NVIDIA GPU cards for computers with AMD APUs that were not supported for any other OS except Windows and Linux.
AMD "consumer" GPUs are a great choice for those who are interested only in games, but not for those interested in any other GPU applications. AMD "datacenter" GPUs are good, but they are far too expensive to be worthwhile for small businesses or for individuals.
On the other hand, my Steam Deck has been exceedingly stable.
So I guess I would say: Buy AMD but understand that they don't have the resources to truly support all of their hardware on any platform, so they have to prioritize.
Took me almost 5 min to drill through enough Wikipedia pages to find the Radeon VII string.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processin... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_RX_Vega_series
Contrast that with the earlier R9 285 that I used for nearly 10 years until I was finally able to get a 9070XT that I'm very happy with. They were still refining support for that aged GCN 1.2 driver even today, even if things are a lower priority to backport.
Overall the ONLY things I'm unhappy about this GPU generation.
* Too damned expensive * Not enough VRAM (and no ECC off of workstation cards?) * Too hard for average consumers to just buy direct and cut out the scalpers
The only way I could get my hands on a card was to buy through a friend that lives within range of a Microcenter. The only true saints of computer hardware in the whole USA.
Both of which NVidia does a lot better in practice! I'm all for open-source in-tree drivers, but in practice, 15 years on, AMD is still buggy on Linux, whereas NVidia works well (not just on Linux but on FreeBSD too).
> I don’t judge whether implicit sync or explicit are better.
Maybe you should.
Correction - if they care. And they don't care to do it on Linux, so you get them dragging feet for decades for something like Wayland support, PRIME, you name it.
Basically, the result is that in practice they offer abysmally bad support, otherwise they'd have upstream kernel drivers and no userspace blobs. Linux users should never buy Nvidia.
I don't understand what you're saying here. I've used NVidia on Linux and FreeBSD a lot. They work great.
If your argument is they don't implement some particular feature that matters to you, fair enough. But that's not an argument that they don't offer stability or Linux support. They do.
Long term support means my thing that has been working great continues to work great. New feature implementation has nothing to do with that and is arguably directly against long term support.
And Nvidia seems justified in this since effectively no distro dropper X11 until Nvidia had support.
I use AMD gpus on linux, I generally regret not just buying an Nvidia GPU purely because of AMDs lacklustre support for compute use cases in general.
Intel is still too new in the dGPU market to trust and on top of that there is so much uncertainty about whether that entire product line will disappear.
So at this point the CUDA moat makes is a non issue, on top of that what works works and keeps working, whereas with AMD I constantly wonder whether something will randomly not work after an update.
A timeline of decades for “features” your biggest consumers don’t care about is a reasonable tradeoff, even more so if actually pushing those features would reduce stability.
Both Mutter and KWin have really good Nvidia Wayland sessions nowadays.
I.e. if anything new will need something implemented tomorrow, Nvidia will make their users wait another decade again. Which I consider an unacceptable level of support and something that flies in the face of those who claim that Nvidia supports Linux well.
/ steps down from soap box /
Funnily, AMD's in-tree drivers are kind of a pain in the ass. For up to a year after a new GPU is released, you have to deal with using mesa and kernel packages from outside your distro.. While if you buy a brand new nVidia card, you just install the latest release of the proprietary drivers and it'll work.
Linux's driver model really is not kind to new hardware releases.
Of course, I still buy AMD because Nvidia's drivers really aren't very good. But that first half a year was not pleasant last time I got a relatively recently released (as in, released half a year earlier) AMD card.
I have since switched from Ubuntu to Fedora, maybe Fedora ships mesa and kernel updates within a week or two from release, I don't know. But being unable to use the preferred distro is a serious downside for many people.
Linux support has been excellent on AMD for less than 15 years though. It got really good around 10 years ago, not before.
They were one of the first to actually support open source drivers, with the r128 and original radeon (r100) drivers. Then went radio silence for the next few years, though the community used that as a baseline to support the next few generations (r100 to r500).
Then they reemerged with actually providing documentation for their Radeon HD series (r600 and r700), and some development resources but limited - and often at odds with the community-run equivalents at the time (lots of parallel development with things like the "radeonhd" driver and disagreements on how much they should rely on their "atombios" card firmware).
That "moderate" level of involvement continued for years, releasing documentation and some initial code for the GCN cards, but it felt like beyond the initial code drops most of the continuing work was more community-run.
Then only relatively recently (the last ~10 years) have they started putting actual engineering effort into things again, with AMDGPU and the majority of mesa changes now being paid for by AMD (or Valve, which is "AMD by proxy" really as you can guarantee every $ they spend on an engineer is $ less they pay to AMD).
So hopefully that's a trend you can actually rely on now, but I've been watching too long to think that can't change on a dime.
Those who want to run Linux seriously will buy AMD. Intel will be slowly phased out, and this will reduce maintenance and increase the quality of anything that previously had to support both Intel and AMD.
However, if Microsoft or Apple scoop up AMD, all hell will break loose. I don’t think either would have interest in Linux support.
Less competition is NOT good news for AMD users. Their CPUs are already at lot less competitively priced now that they beat Intel for market share.
I have been looking at high-end laptops with dedicated AMD Graphics chip, but can't find many... So I will probably go with AMD+NVidia with MUX switch, let's see how it goes... Unless someone else has other suggestions?
This actually makes sense: for example, a new task has swapped out previous task's data, or host and guest are sharing the GPU and pushing each others data away. I don't understand why this is not a part of GPU-related standards.
As for solution, discarding all the GPU data after resume won't help? Or keeping the data in the system RAM.
However, doing research when buying a new pc, I've found that AMD kind of sucks too. ROCm isn't even supported on many of the systems i was looking into. Also, I've heard their Linux graphics drivers are poor.
So basically I just rock a potato with Intel integrated graphics now. GPUs cost too much to deal with that nonsense.
That would seem weird to be. Intel’s iGPUs are an incredibly good solution for their (non-glamorous) niche.
Intel’s dGPUs might be in a risky spot, though. (So… what’s new?)
Messing up Intel’s iGPUs would be a huge practical loss for, like, everyday desktop Linux folks. Tossing out their dGPUs, I don’t know if it is such a huge loss.
It would be an enormous loss to the consumer/enthusiast GPU buyer, as a third major competitor is improving the market from what feels like years and years of dreadful price/perf ratio.
Literally a previous gen card.
Even before the Pascal GTs, most of the GT 7xx cards, which you would assume were Maxwell or Kepler from the numbering, were rebadged Fermi cards (4xx and 5xx)! That generation was just a dumping ground for all the old chips they had laying about, and given the prominence of halfway decent iGPUs by that point, I can't say I blame them for investing so little in the lineup.
That said, the dGPUs are definitely somewhat at risk, but I think the risk is only slightly elevated by this investment, given that it isn't exactly a cash cow and Intel has been doing all sorts of cost-cutting lately.
This has been somewhat improved-- some mainboards will have HDMI and DisplayPort plumbed to the iGPU, but the classic "trader desk" with 4-6 screens hardly needs a 5090.
They could theoretically sell the same 7xx and 1030 chips indefinitely. I figure it's a static market like those strange 8/16Mb VGA chipsets that you sometimes see on server mainboards, just enough hardware to run diagnostics on a normally headless box.
I saw this move more as setting up a worthy competitor to Snapdragon X Elite, and it could also probably crush AMD APUs if these RTX things are powerful.
It was definitely going to upset the market. Now i understand the radio silence on a card that was supposed to have been coming by Xmas.
I just meant their integrated GPUs are what's completely safe here.
Also the arc wasn't in jeopardy, the arc cards have been improving with every release and the latest one got pretty rave reviews.
(And also, I'm pretending Macs don't exist for this statement. They aren't even PCs anymore anyway, just giant iPhones, from a silicon perspective.)
To anyone actually paying attention, igpus have come a long way. They are no longer an 'I can play minecraft' thing.
I hadn't realized that "Arc" and "Integrated" overlapped, I thought that brand and that level of power was only being used on discrete cards.
I do think that integrated Arc will probably be killed by this deal though, not for being bad as it's obviously great, rather for being a way for Intel to cut costs with no downsides for Intel. If they can make RTX iGPUs now, and the Nvidia and RTX brand being the strongest in the gaming space... Intel isn't going to invest the money in continuing to develop Arc, even if Nvidia made it clear that they don't care, it just doesn't make any business sense now.
That is a loss for the cause of gaming competition. Although having Nvidia prop up Intel may prove to be a win for competition in terms of silicon in general versus them being sold off in parts, which could be a real possibility it seems.
Wait, RDR2 is badly optimized? When I played it on my Intel Arc B580 and Ryzen 7 5800X, it seemed to work pretty well! Way better than almost any UE5 title, like The Forever Winter (really cool concept, but couldn't get past 20-30 FPS, even dropping down to 10% render scale on a 1080p monitor). Or with the Borderlands 4 controversy, I thought there'd be way bigger fish to fry.
Out of 12 mobile GT 7xx cards only 3 were Fermi (and 2 of those were M and not GT) rest were Kepler.
They were felt at an IC level.
5% by about any accounting makes you a very, very influential stockholder in a publicly traded company with a widely distributed set of owners.
- The datacenter GPU market is 10x larger than the consumer GPU market for Nvidia (and it's still growing). Winning an extra few percentage points in consumer is not a priority anymore.
- Nvidia doesn't have a CPU offering for the datacenter market and they were blocked from acquiring ARM. It's in their interest to have a friend on the CPU side.
- Nvidia is fabless and has concentrated supplier and geopolitical risk with TSMC. Intel is one of the only other leading fabs onshoring, which significantly improves Nvidia's supplier negotiation position and hedges geopolitical risk.
Someone should tell nvidia that. They sure seem to think they have a datacenter CPU.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/grace-cpu-superchip...
But there's always TSMC being a pretty hard bottleneck - maybe they just can't get enough (and can't charge close to their GPU offerings per wafer), and pairing with Intel themselves is preferable to just using Intel's Foundry services?
To be fair from what I hear someone really should tell at least half of nvidia that.
East India Company has been conducting continental wars on its own. A modern company with $4T valuation and a country-GDP-size revenue and possessing key military technology of today and tomorrow wars - AI software and hardware, including robotics - can successfully wage such a continental war through a suitable proxy, say an oversized private military contractor (especially if it massively armed with drones and robots), and in particular is capable of defending an island like Taiwan. (or thinking backwards - an attack on Taiwan would cause a trillion or two drop in NVDA valuation. What options get on the table when there is a threat of a trillion dollar loss ... To compare - 20 years of Iraq cost 3 trillions, ie. 150B/year buy you a lot of military hardware and action, and efficient defense of Taiwan would cost much less than that.)
An example - Starlink antenna, sub-$500, a phased array which actually is like a half or a third of such an array on a modern fighter jet where it cost several millions. Musk naturally couldn't go the way of a million-per-antenna, so he had to develop and source it on his own. The same with anti-missile defense - if/when NVDA gets to it to defend the TSMC fabs, NVDA would produce such defense systems orders of magnitude cheaper, and that defense would work much better than the modern military systems.
China's economy shuts down in a month, their population starves in another month
> Nvidia is fabless and has concentrated supplier and geopolitical risk with TSMC. Intel is one of the only other leading fabs onshor[e]
TSMC is building state of the art fabs in Arizona, USA. Samsung in Texas, USA. I assume these are being done to reduce geopolitical risk on all sides.Something that I never read about: Why can't NVidia use Samsung fabs? They are very close to TSMC state of the art.
They're not. Most have tried at 1 point. Apple had a release with TSMC + Samsung and users spotted a difference. There was quite a bit of negativity.
Taiwanese gov prevents them from doing it. Leading node has to be on Taiwanese soil
> Taiwanese gov prevents them from doing it. Leading node has to be on Taiwanese soil
This is bold claim. Do you have a public evidence to share? I have never once seen this mentioned in any newspaper articles that I have read about TSMC and their expansion in the US.American competition isn't a zero sum, and it's in Nvidias' best interest to keep the market healthy.
Looking at Google's recent antitrust settlement, I'm not sure this is true at present.
the fact that google pay firefox anually meaning that its in best interest of google that there is no monopoly, judge says
So yes. That's how American competition works.
It isn't a zero sum game. We try to create a market environment that is competitive and dynamic.
Monopolies are threat to both the company and a free open dynamic market. If Nvidia feels it could face an antitrust suit, which is reasonable, it is in its best interest to fund the future of Intel.
That's American capitalism.
Looking at Google's recent antitrust settlement, I'm not sure this is true at present.
Google search is genuinely being threatened.
Google is not a monopoly, not entirely.
If AI usage also starts accruing to Google then there should be a new antitrust suit.
https://www.theregister.com/1998/10/29/microsoft_paid_apple_...
> handwritten note by Fred Anderson, Apple's CFO, in which Anderson wrote that "the [QuickTime] patent dispute was resolved with cross-licence and significant payment to Apple." The payment was $150 million
Quicktime got stolen by an ex-Apple employee & in return Apple had Microsoft commit money & promise to have Office suite available on macOS/OS X
[0] https://thisdayintechhistory.com/12/06/apple-sues-over-quick...
Nvidia is leaning more into data centres, but lack a CPU architecture or expertise. Intel is struggling financially, but have knowledge in iGPUs and a vast amount of patents.
They could have alot to give one another, and it's a massive win if it keeps intel afloat.
Nvidia is contributing to Nova, the new Nvidia driver for GSP based hardware.
https://rust-for-linux.com/nova-gpu-driver
Alexandre Courbot, an Nvidia dev, is comaintainer.
The days of Nvidia ignoring Linux is over.
The "F you Nvidia" Linus Torvalds moment in 2012 is a meme that will not die.
For context, I highly recommend the old Stratechery articles on the history of Intel foundry.
Intel could either transform into Fabless company compete on design, and manufacture with TSMC. Or they continue to be a Foundry player, crucial to US strategic interest. You can only pick one, and competing on just one of them is already a monumental task.
GPU is burning money. With no short term success in sight that could make them cash flow positive in 3 - 4 years time frame. I have been stating this since 2016 and we are now coming close to 2026, recent market share suggest Intel is at less than 1% discrete market share. Especially given the strong roadmap Nvidia has.
This gives a perfect excuse for Intel to quit GPU. Nvidia to provide the cash flow to hopefully continue to develop A18 and A14. Manufacture Nvidia GPU for them, and slowly transition itself out to only x86 + Foundry model. Or even solely manufacture for Nvidia. US administration further force Apple, Qualcomm and Broadcom to use Intel in some capacity. Assuming Intel can keep up with TSMC, which is probably a comparatively easier task than to tackle the GPU market.
I am assuming the Intel board is happy with that direction though. Because so far they have shown they are completely lack of any strategic vision.
Using fortunes falling in the lap to kill competition is a common practice of economics (vs. technology) oriented organizations. That brings benefits only for the organization, for others it brings damages and disappointments.
For instance, maybe if there were 4 strong vendors making the devices with diverse operating systems, native apps wouldn't have ever become important, and the Web platform would have gotten better sooner to fill that gap.
Or maybe it'd have ended up the same or worse. But I just don't think Apple being this dominant has been good for the world.
edit: god they're still around https://vertu.com/
Sidekick was amazing for its time, but only on one also-ran carrier. BlackBerry had great features like BBM (essentially iMessage) but underpowered for multimedia and more difficult to learn. If Apple was out of business, one or more companies would have made the billions on MP3 players that iPod made, and any of them could have branched into phones and made a splash the same way. Perhaps Sony, perhaps Microsoft. Microsoft eventually figured it out -- the only reason they failed was that they waited for both Apple and Android to become entrenched so in this timeline they could have been the second-mover, but unlike with Apple and Android, maybe neither MS nor Google would have automatically owned the US marketshare the way Apple does[1]. If that were the case, we may have competition, instead of the unhealthy thing we have where Apple just does whatever they want.
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile/united...
They had such a lead that nobody was going to catch up and eat into their economic profits. Sure Samsung et al have captured marketshare, but not eaten into Apples economic profits.
Whether you like it or not, this hard work, effort and creativity deserves to be rewarded - in the form of monopoly/oligopoly profits.
Apple has shown itself to be very disciplined with its cash. That cannot be said of for Google, who instead of taking an endless stream of vanity projects, should return that cash back to shareholders.
To be honest, Android may have met a similar fate if Apple had been able to negotiate a non-exclusive contract with Cingular/AT&T. My understanding though was that they had to give exclusivity as a bargaining chip to get all the then-unthinkable concessions, as yeah, every phone was full of garbage bloatware and festooned with logos.
Is that's why to use Cuda in Windows you have to use WSL2 (virtualized linux)
it would invite an DOJ case
> As a Linux user who favors Intel hardware due to their Linux support
I'm confused here. Are you talking about Intel CPUs or GPUs? And does AMD not have excellent Linux support for their own CPUs and GPUs?Both. Also things like sound cards, network cards, peripherals in general.
My happiness and stability while using Linux has been well correlated with the number of devices with Intel in the name. Every single device without Intel invariably becomes a major pain in my ass every single time.
It's gotten to the point I assume it will just work if it's Intel.
> And does AMD not have excellent Linux support for their own CPUs and GPUs?
They're making a lot of progress but Intel is still years ahead of them.
Earlier this year I was researching PC parts for a build and discovered AMD was still working on merging functionality like on die temperature sensors into the kernel. It makes me think I won't have a full feature set on Linux if I buy one of their processors.