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Submitted via IRC for takyon
Continuing on from the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 expectations on Linux shared earlier this week, here's a list of ten reasons why Linux gamers might want to pass on these soon-to-launch graphics cards from NVIDIA.
The list are various reasons you may want to think twice on these graphics cards -- at least not for pre-ordering any of them right away. Not all of them are specific to the Turing GPUs per se but also some NVIDIA Linux infrastructure problems or general Linux gaming challenges, but here's the list for those curious. And, yes, a list is coming out soon with reasons Linux users may want to consider the RTX 20 series -- well, mostly for developers / content creators it may make sense.
Here is the list:
- Lack of open-source driver support
- It will be a while before seeing RTX/ray-tracing Linux games
- Turing appears to be a fairly incremental upgrade outside of RTX
- The GeForce GTX 1080 series already runs very well
- Poor Wayland support
- The Linux driver support for Turing is unclear
- These graphics cards are incredibly expensive
- SLI is next to worthless on Linux
- VR Linux support is still in rough shape
- Pascal prices will almost surely drop
That's the quick list outside of my detailed pre-launch Linux analysis. A similar list of the pros for the RTX 20 series on Linux will be coming out shortly. It will certainly be interesting to see after 20 September how the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20 series works on Linux.
Source: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=10-Reasons-Pass-RTX-20-Linux
Previously: Nvidia Announces RTX 2080 Ti, 2080, and 2070 GPUs, Claims 25x Increase in Ray-Tracing Performance
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Wednesday September 12 2018, @06:03AM (5 children)
Why would NVidia want to hold on to driver code anyway? Drivers are not their profit center. Selling graphic boards is. But the driver is required or the boards won't sell.
What's the deal with keeping the code under wraps? To me, this seems to make just about as much sense as if Elon Musk started keeping the locations of Tesla charging stations under wraps. What the heck do I want with a car that I don't know where to charge it? Or buy a car that runs on toluene.
I would think all of the graphics card vendors oughta be more than happy to share how to use their product, just to encourage more people to buy the hardware.
I have bought hundreds of ATMEL 328 chips ( hopefully, one day I will be buying millions of them! ), but I would not have bought one had the Arduino framework that educated me on to how to use these chips not been in existence. There would have been a good chance I used PIC processors instead.
Does the ATMEL executives know a marketing trick that the NVidia executives aren't aware of? Like letting the customers know how to use their product?
Once customers understand what is out there, they design it into things... and isn't that what damn near every manufacturer wants? His thing designed into something else? Meaning every time his customer makes a sale, he made one too! But by observation, that seems to be a difficult concept for some marketing executives to comprehend.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Aiwendil on Wednesday September 12 2018, @06:31AM (2 children)
Cost, laziness, speed-of-deployment, and secrecy (secrets of the trade)
Basically is it a lot easier, cheaper and faster to put logic in software than in hardware, and adding an "interface module" would mean extra cost.
I strongly suspect nvidia has taken a shortcut that is quite normal with supercomputers in that they expose _everything_ (caches, computing units...) to the software, and this basically means that the software will tell you in detail how the underlying piece of hardware works - so I wouldn't be surprised if their properiatary driver also contains a JIT-compiler for the card in question and that lots of the logic for how to stuff the pipes and arrange the workflow is in there rather than in silicon (this also would mean that a lot of their competetive edge is in the drivers).
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Wednesday September 12 2018, @01:27PM
There is indeed a JIT compiler as part of the drivers (libnvidia-ptxjitcompiler.so).
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Arik on Wednesday September 12 2018, @03:27PM
Don't forget plain old stupidity.
"(this also would mean that a lot of their competetive edge is in the drivers)."
Well, yeah, sort of.
Their drivers (the bits of them that work as they should, at least) are definitely key to making their hardware perform, which is why the lack of good linux drivers costs them sales.
But the implication that you are clearly taking from this that documenting their hardware would destroy that advantage is way off.
You think they're revealing secrets? There are just a handful of players and if there are any secrets between them they're very short lived. These guys are pros, they don't need a proper driver, they grab the competitors product off a store shelf and combine it with a proper test rig and they can figure out what's going on. The 'secret' side of this, in any business important sense, probably has more to do with patents. These same players have made their field into a patent minefield, and published source code *could* make it easier to spot and sue for patent infringement. This gives them incumbent advantage, and they like this, of course, but it's not at all good for the rest of us.
That's the downside for them. The upside would be that their hardware would find a wider market initially, and once some time went by this could also help their own development process going forward. So it would make the competitive advantage in those drivers *greater*, not less, over time.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by rigrig on Wednesday September 12 2018, @09:30AM (1 child)
No, they want NVIDIA developers to help game developers optimize things, because that way games end up performing best on NVIDIA hardware.
No one remembers the singer.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday September 13 2018, @12:00PM
Old hardware engineer here.... and I remember back in my heyday of the 80's, how sales reps were stumbling all over themselves, bringing us all sorts of databooks, samples, anything it took, to get us to design their chips into the stuff we made.
If we did not know how it worked, no way were we designing the thing in because we thought it looked cool.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]