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points by esFran 3 days ago | 0 comments
Love them or hate them, from a customer's point of view AMD is the only company in a position to stand up to NVIDIA in the GPU market and force those sky-high prices down a bit. I'm eagerly waiting for their new models, now backed by a much more mature and well-thought-out ROCm.

I'm not joking. I'm running a Maxwell-era NVIDIA card, and on Linux it's one problem after another. I HATE NVIDIA's driver; it's one of the worst-made pieces of software I've ever seen.

[–] simonask 3 days ago
The Maxwell architecture is 12 years old. Like, I'm not out here defending NVIDIA's Linux drivers, but I also think it's unreasonable to expect great support for extremely complicated hardware that's over a decade old.

I've personally had zero issues with NVIDIA on Linux on both Turing (20xx) and Blackwell (50xx).

[–] esFran 3 days ago
I agree that it’s an old, outdated, and obsolete architecture... but it is perfectly well-preserved and meets my current and future needs. I look at it like a car or a motorcycle; it might be 10 years old and lack an ADAS safety system or a giant touchscreen, but it’s still functional—in other words, I get to choose when to replace it.

The problem with NVIDIA is that its driver is an incredibly delicate component of its GPUs. With each new generation, the company implements—via software, through micro-routines—features that it failed to deliver in the hardware itself. If the driver were open—meaning one that the community could develop and maintain—I could continue using my GPU without any issues. Intel and AMD support the Mesa graphics stack, with full functionality. Why doesn’t NVIDIA?

[–] nickserv 3 days ago
Just get an AMD card then? I would think an equivalent AMD would be fairly cheap these days.

I've been running AMD cards for over 15 years now and support has only gotten better over the years.

[–] simonask 3 days ago
The answer is that it doesn't make any financial sense for a hardware company in the business of selling new hardware to spend any software development resources at all on products that are 12 years old. There's a very clear conflict of interest.

Your problem is with capitalism, and I'm with you, but what you should be pushing for is legislation that forces companies to publish detailed specs for obsolete hardware so open source enthusiasts can do the work. Call it an extended "right to repair" or whatever.

In the meantime, have you tried the Nouveau driver for your setup?