Hi On Fri, 16 Oct 2020 05:38:17 -0400 Neal Gompa wrote:

On Fri, Oct 16, 2020 at 5:30 AM Hans-Peter Jansen wrote:

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Am Freitag, 16. Oktober 2020, 01:54:00 CEST schrieb Michal Kubecek:

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On Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 02:38:19PM +0200, Hans-Peter Jansen wrote:

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Self-crippling comes to my mind.

Yes, "self-crippling" is probably the most fitting term for users who decided to ignore the long existing (20 years?) licensing problem and keep buying NVidia hardware because they believe it's their right to demand someone to "just make it work somehow" (i.e. do some dark magic to mask the incompatibility) so that they can keep pretending the problem does not exist.

Even more fitting for those who do it on a rolling distribution with latest kernel like Tumbleweed.

Michal, I share your sediments from deep inside my open source heart, but..

All those kids, that came to me this year to buy/build a PC (I do this from time to time for pedagogical reasons) have a list in their hands with must have equipment, and guess what's *always* on position Nr. 1:

NVIDIA GTX 20{70,80,90}

depending on their budget and granted, they never want to discuss the manufacturer part of the story. About 30% get an openSUSE TW installation on top of the Win10 basement, and about 10% finally use TW primarily (because their favorite game is Minecraft, which is mostly fine with a decent GPU, using extensive texture packs and a huge view distance, *even* on Linux!). Those guys love Krita and Blender as well.

I always ask myself, why is AMD not able to catch up in this segment. My humble guess is, they're *too* successful. Fun fact: almost all PCs I've talked about are equipped with their CPUs. AMD is messing up the GPU market, *because* their GPUs are so successful in special markets (crypto currency and such). Attracting the youth is *far* more harder.

Attracting people is something we as openSUSE have to catch up on as well. Things like GPU acceleration for all kinds of workloads (UI, GFX, KI) should work out of the box for GPUs with open sourced drivers, but contrasts a lot with the X vs. Wayland mess, HiDPI issues, HDR absence, tearing on simple video playback, ...

There are two big problems with AMD right now for *most* people:

* No CUDA support * No NVENC/NVDEC support

The former is basically a requirement for anything remarkably close to prosumer, nevermind the scientific world which has been trapped into CUDA as well. The content creator and gaming groups *need* NVENC/NVDEC because that's what all the tools support. Even Open Broadcaster Software only supports NVENC for GPU-accelerated streaming.

Somehow, for over a decade, there still is no CUDA reimplementation for Free platforms. Maybe I missed something, but it seems like nobody ever tried. Consequently, NVIDIA Is dominant because that API is just not usable without an NVIDIA card. There's virtually no adoption of OpenCL, which means that for other GPUs to succeed, CUDA needs to work on those GPUs. But there's no reimplementation of CUDA, so we're back to where we started.

There are efforts to create something like CUDA, but free. Don't hold your breath, though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTq8wKnVUZ8 https://www.khronos.org/sycl/ Best reards Thomas

This is how open source loses.

-- Thomas Zimmermann Graphics Driver Developer SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany (HRB 36809, AG Nürnberg) Geschäftsführer: Felix Imendörffer -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kernel+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-kernel+owner@opensuse.org