Comment by rwmj

10 hours ago

A laundry list of excuses ... or a list of things to work on. ("Why the hell do we have two driver teams?" - would be my #1 thing to fix if I was at AMD.)

7 comments

rwmj

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jeroenhd  8 hours ago

The "fix" would be to make games perform like shit on Windows and disable HDR and other proprietary features, or to abolish the open Linux drivers. You can't have both, unless you do what Nvidia does and move all of the proprietary stuff to the GPU firmware and write a minimal driver to control that massive firmware blob. Which, obviously, would require reengineering the GPU hardware, which is expensive and of questionable value.

They can't open source their proprietary drivers even if they wanted to because they don't own all of the IP and their code is full of NDA'd trade secrets. AMD isn't paying two different teams to do the same work because they like wasting money.

  • wirybeige  6 hours ago

    AMD already has large firmware blobs. Both intel and nvidia have the software side of GPUs figured out.

    • bayindirh  6 hours ago

      NVIDIA's blobs are different when compared to others. They do not want to give away how their GPU clocking and enablement works. As a result, NVIDIA's blobs are both signed and picky about "who" they communicate with. You can't use the NVIDIA's full fledged firmware with nouveau for example.

      On the other hand, the card enablement sequences are open for AMD and Intel. AMD only protects card's thermal and fan configuration data to preventing card damage, AFAIK. You can clock the card and use its power management features the way you like. For NVIDIA, even they are out of reach.

      AMD's open drivers work way better than NVIDIA's closed ones, too. I have never seen how a single application refused to launch until I used NVIDIA closed drivers.

bayindirh  10 hours ago

I guess that you don't understand that how silicon and 3rd party IP works. It took Intel a completely new GPU from scratch to be able to open drivers. AMD did at least one revision to their silicon to enable that kind of openness.

Yet, HDMI forum said that they can't implement an HDMI2.1 capable driver in the open, with some nasty legal letters.

I have a couple of friends who wrote 3D engines from scratch and debugged graphics drivers for their engines for a living. It's a completely different jungle filled with completely different beasts.

I think being able to call glxinfo on an AMD card running with completely open drivers and being able to see extensions from NVIDIA, AMD, SGI, IBM and others is a big win already.