They even used to be the best drivers, a long time ago when nobody cared about the graphics stack. Had ATI/AMD? You got the FGLRX proprietary driver and it was really bad.
12 years ago it was probably one of the least broken GPU drivers available. You actually got most of your GPUs capabilities.
Now with Intel and AMD going open-source, those are now the best drivers and NVIDIA is lagging behind and not keeping up with advancements in the Linux graphics stack. Hopefully the open driver and NVK catches up and brings everyone a good open-source NVIDIA experience so we can stop relying on the proprietary driver.
Technically AMD also offers an open Vulkan driver (AMDVLK), it’s just dog shit, and an open compute driver (Rocm), its just also bad, and an open OpenGL driver (Radeonsi), which is solid.
Those three are all primarily developed by AMD engineers and are fully open. Nvidia has no such open equivalents.
While I mostly agree, NVIDIA has NVK and NVIDIA themselves just dropped a bunch of code into it.
The NVIDIA open source kernel modules are also certified ( by NVIDIA ) to work with their driver. So, you do not have to use proprietary kernel modules anymore.
They’ve been doing that for a long time. And yes raytracing works.
They even used to be the best drivers, a long time ago when nobody cared about the graphics stack. Had ATI/AMD? You got the FGLRX proprietary driver and it was really bad.
12 years ago it was probably one of the least broken GPU drivers available. You actually got most of your GPUs capabilities.
Now with Intel and AMD going open-source, those are now the best drivers and NVIDIA is lagging behind and not keeping up with advancements in the Linux graphics stack. Hopefully the open driver and NVK catches up and brings everyone a good open-source NVIDIA experience so we can stop relying on the proprietary driver.
They’ll never catch up if Nvidia doesn’t open their driver. Which they don’t show any interest in doing.
Nvidia already opened their driver, at least to the same extent as AMD, which is why NVK is able to exist.
Technically AMD also offers an open Vulkan driver (AMDVLK), it’s just dog shit, and an open compute driver (Rocm), its just also bad, and an open OpenGL driver (Radeonsi), which is solid.
Those three are all primarily developed by AMD engineers and are fully open. Nvidia has no such open equivalents.
While I mostly agree, NVIDIA has NVK and NVIDIA themselves just dropped a bunch of code into it.
The NVIDIA open source kernel modules are also certified ( by NVIDIA ) to work with their driver. So, you do not have to use proprietary kernel modules anymore.
These are all pretty big steps.