Comment by bayindirh

NVIDIA and AMD, from my experience, have completely different cultures.

ATI started as a much more closed company. Then, they pivoted and started to open their parts. They were hamstrung at the HDCP at one point, and they decided to decouple HDCP block from video accelerators at silicon level to allow open source drivers to access video hardware without leaking/disabling HDCP support. So, they devoted to open what they have, but when you have tons of legacy IP, things doesn't go from 0 to 100 in a day. I want to remind that "game dependent driver optimization" started pre 2000s. This is how rooted these codebases are.

NVIDIA took a different approach, which was being indifferent on the surface, but their hardware became a bit more hostile at every turn towards nouveau. Then they released some specs to allow "hardware enablement" by nouveau, so closed source drivers can be installed, and the card didn't blank-screened at boot.

Then, as they fought with kernel developers, with some hard prodding by Kernel guys and some coercing by RedHat, NVIDIA accepted to completely remove "shim" shenanigans, and moved closed bits of the kernel module to card firmware by revising card architecture. It's important to keep in mind that NVIDIA's open drivers means "an open, bare bones kernel module, a full fledged and signed proprietary firmware which can be used by closed source drivers only and a closed source GLX stack", where in AMD this means "An open source kernel module, standard MESA libraries, and a closed source firmware available to all drivers".

It was in talks with nouveau guys to allow them to use the full powered firmware with clock and power management support, but I don't know where it went.

The CUDA environment is also the same. Yes it works very well, and it's a vast garden, but it's walled and protected by electrified fence and turrets. You're all in, or all out.