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points by laughing_man 4 days ago | 0 comments

Nvidia was already a bad choice for Linux because of closed drivers.

Not really, because for more than 2 decades the closed-source NVIDIA Linux drivers were at parity of features and performance with the Windows drivers, unlike the AMD drivers before they were open-sourced, which was much more recently.

This is a new thing with the firmware that can be used only by Windows. If this NVIDIA policy continues, then NVIDIA will indeed become a bad choice for Linux, but until now, for graphics and AI applications NVIDIA has been the best choice for Linux, by providing the best performance and reliability.

For pure computational applications, especially for those requiring good FP64 throughput, there are many years since NVIDIA has become a worse choice than AMD and more recently also than Intel, but that is due to poor hardware support, not to bad software support.

[–] laughing_man 3 days ago

Based on the numbers I looked at when I installed Ubuntu last year, while AMD cards match or even exceed Windows performance, on Nvidia a whole lot of popular games run at just over half speed compared to the Windows version, and none of them run faster.

[–] adrian_b 3 days ago

What kind of games were those, Windows games?

If they were using DirectX through Wine, perhaps the DirectX emulation is not optimized for NVIDIA, but only for AMD.

I do not play games, but I have used professional graphics or computational programs using OpenGL/Vulkan/CUDA/OpenCL natively on Linux with the NVIDIA driver, and those have always been as fast or faster than on Windows.

The AMD and the Intel cards have always had poor drivers for OpenGL, which frequently cheated in order to get better benchmark results, by having various rendering defects in comparison with the NVIDIA cards, so when running a benchmark like SPECviewperf, the advantage of NVIDIA has always been much greater than the already higher speed, because that speed was obtained while rendering everything correctly, while with Intel or AMD many things were rendered only approximately.

I actually have more AMD and Intel GPUs than NVIDIA GPUs, but I continue to use the NVIDIA GPUs for graphics, due to a better driver, while I use Intel and AMD for general-purpose computations. However, I have not tested Intel and AMD with a Vulkan graphics application, to see whether they work better with Vulkan than with the obsolete OpenGL.

[–] laughing_man 3 days ago

Yes, I'm mostly interested in games that were developed for Windows and running on Proton.

[–] lcampbell 3 days ago

> closed-source NVIDIA Linux drivers were at parity of features and performance with the Windows drivers

Hell, their old closed-source NVIDIA _FreeBSD_ drivers were at parity with Windows. CUDA included (though the CUDA toolkit required Linuxulator syscall emulation to run the Linux bins).

Imagine my surprise when my new Blackwell card didn’t work, and that the newly required open source drivers were Linux-only.