As a reminder, the same (closed-source) user-space components for OpenGL / OpenCL / Vulkan / CUDA are used regardless of the NVIDIA kernel driver option with their official driver stack.
CUDA hell remains. :(
AMD needs to get their ducks in a row. They already have the advantage of not being Nvidia
They already have the advantage of not being Nvidia
That’s just because they release worse products.
If AMD had Nvidia’s marketshare, they would be just as scummy as the business climate allows.
In fact, AMD piggybacks off of Nvidia’s scumbaggery to charge more for their GPUs rather than engage in an actual price war.
Who would’ve thunk that big, for profit, tech companies don’t care about us :T
ROCm is it’s own hell (unless they finally put some resources into it in the past couple years)
Yes, the CUDA is the only reason why I consider NVIDIA. I really hate this company but the AMD tech stack is really inferior.
So is CUDA good or bad?
I keep reading it’s hell, but the best. Apparently it’s the single one reason why Nvidia is so big with AI, but it sucks.
What is it?
Both.
The good: CUDA is required for maximum performance and compatibility with machine learning (ML) frameworks and applications. It is a legitimate reason to choose Nvidia, and if you have an Nvidia card you will want to make sure you have CUDA acceleration working for any compatible ML workloads.
The bad: Getting CUDA to actually install and run correctly is a giant pain in the ass for anything but the absolute most basic use case. You will likely need to maintain multiple framework versions, because new ones are not backwards-compatible. You’ll need to source custom versions of Python modules compiled against specific versions of CUDA, which opens a whole new circle of Dependency Hell. And you know how everyone and their dog publishes shit with Docker now? Yeah, have fun with that.
That said, AMD’s equivalent (ROCm) is just as bad, and AMD is lagging about a full generation behind Nvidia in terms of ML performance.
The easy way is to just use OpenCL. But that’s not going to give you the best performance, and it’s not going to be compatible with everything out there.
I think this will change. Nvidia hired devs on Nouveau, NVK is coming along, etc
Last I checked, there is no evidence Nvidia has hired anyone to work on Nouveau.
Well… it is an out-of-tree kernel driver that is made by the same company, and the userspace drivers are still proprietary.
This says NOTHING other than “wow NVIDIA can write good code (open source) that doesnt suck”?
How is it different. Wouldn’t just be the same software with source code available?
It’s not, they’re not open sourcing their driver. They’ve made an open source driver.
Usually this is done for licensing reasons. They probably don’t want the old code caught up in the open license they’re shipping the new driver under.
My understanding is that the new open driver separates proprietary code into a black box binary blob that isn’t distributed under an open source license. I’m guessing that they’ve been very careful not to include anything they want to keep closed into the new open driver, whereas the old driver wasn’t written with this separation in mind.
Woohoo!
Anyone tried this beta version yet? Any idea how stable it is?
