Nvidia won, we all lost

> With over 90% of the PC market running on NVIDIA tech, they’re the clear winner of the GPU race. The losers are every single one of us.

I have been rocking AMD GPU ever since the drivers were upstreamed into the linux kernel. No regrets.

I have also realized that there is a lot out there in the world besides video games, and getting all in a huff about it isn’t worth my time or energy. But consumer gotta consoooooom and then cry and outrage when they are exploited instead of just walking away and doing something else.

Same with magic the gathering, the game went to shit and so many people got outraged and in a big huff but they still spend thousands on the hobby. I just stopped playing mtg.

I am not a gamer and don't why AMD GPUs aren't good enough. It's weird since both Xbox and PlayStation are using AMD GPUs.

I guess there games that you can only play on PC with Nvidia graphics. That begs the question why someone create a game and ignore large console market.

> AMD GPUs aren't good enough.

Software. AMD has traditionally been really bad at their drivers. (They also missed the AI train and are trying to catch up).

I use Linux and have learned not to touch AMD GPUs (and to a lesser extent CPUs due to chipset quality/support) a long time ago. Even if they are better now, (I feel) Intel integrated (if no special GPU perf needed) or NVidia are less risky choices.

This is wrong. For 14 years the recommendation on Linux is:

    * Purchase always AMD.      
    * Purchase never Nvidia.
    * Intel is also okay.

Because the AMD drivers are good and open-source. And AMD cares about bug reports. The one from Nvidia can and will create issues because they’re closed-source and avoided for years to support Wayland. Now Nvidia published source-code and refuses to merge it into Linux and Mesa facepalm

While Nvidia comes up with proprietary stuff AMD brought us Vulkan, FreeSync, supported Wayland well already with Implicit-Sync (like Intel) and used the regular Video-Acceleration APIs for long time.

Meanwhile Nvidia:

https://registry.khronos.org/OpenGL/extensions/NV/NV_robustn...

    It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!

Their bad drivers still don’t handle simple actions like a VT-Switch or Suspend/Resume. If a developer doesn’t know about that extension the users suffer for years.

Okay. But that is probably only a short term solution? It is Nvidias short term solution since 2016!

https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Ubuntu-2025-SnR

I've been using a 4090 on my linux workstation for a few years now. Its mostly fine - with the occasional bad driver version randomly messing things up. I'm using linux mint. Mint uses X11, which, while silly, means suspend / resume works fine.

NVIDIA's drivers also recently completely changed how they worked. Hopefully that'll result in a lot of these long term issues getting fixed. As I understand it, the change is this: The nvidia drivers contain a huge amount of proprietary, closed source code. This code used to be shipped as a closed source binary blob which needed to run on your CPU. And that caused all sorts of problems - because its linux and you can't recompile their binary blob. Earlier this year, they moved all the secret, proprietary parts into a firmware image instead which runs on a coprocessor within the GPU itself. This then allowed them to - at last - opensource (most? all?) of their remaining linux driver code. And that means we can patch and change and recompile that part of the driver. And that should mean the wayland & kernel teams can start fixing these issues.

In theory, users shouldn't notice any changes at all. But I suspect all the nvidia driver problems people have been running into lately have been fallout from this change.

They opened a tiny kernel level sliver of their driver, everything else (including OpenGL stack et al) is and will still be closed.

Sadly, a couple of years ago someone seriously misunderstood the news about "open sourcing" their drivers and spread that misunderstanding widely; many people now think their whole driver stack is open, when in reality it's like 1% of the code — the barest minimum they could get away with (I'm excluding GSP code here).

The real FOSS driver is Nova, and it's driven by the community with zero help from Nvidia, as always.