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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday September 12 2018, @03:08AM   Printer-friendly
from the top-ten-list dept.

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:

  1. Lack of open-source driver support
  2. It will be a while before seeing RTX/ray-tracing Linux games
  3. Turing appears to be a fairly incremental upgrade outside of RTX
  4. The GeForce GTX 1080 series already runs very well
  5. Poor Wayland support
  6. The Linux driver support for Turing is unclear
  7. These graphics cards are incredibly expensive
  8. SLI is next to worthless on Linux
  9. VR Linux support is still in rough shape
  10. 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


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Arik on Wednesday September 12 2018, @03:27PM

    by Arik (4543) on Wednesday September 12 2018, @03:27PM (#733653) Journal
    "Cost, laziness, speed-of-deployment, and secrecy (secrets of the trade)"

    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.

    --
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