I always think just open sourcing the whole software stack for graphics cards would be an excellent thing for hardware manufacturers, in the end these are free pieces of software and I've certain there would be a big community contributing loads of cool things for free. AMD (say) would also sell a load more hardware as enthusiast features would be added by the community.

Maybe I'm just naive but the downsides of doing this seem absolutely minimal and the upsides quite large.

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Symmetry 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Those are essentially the reasons that Intel has always(?) had open source GPU drivers and AMD has been supporting open source since around 2009. As a result I think most people would recommend AMD cards for people interested in gaming on Linux, the experience can be a lot smoother than using NVidia's closed source drivers.

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ChocolateGod 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's easier said than done, AMD and Nvidia probably have licensed and patented code etc in their closed-source drivers, which would make it difficult to open source, where as a project open source from the get go won't have these issues.

Nvidia got around this on their kernel driver by moving most of it to the cards firmware.

	▲	5 days ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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giancarlostoro 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I still do not understand why they don't it makes their hardware basically good for life, since now you can run it on any OS if you really want to put the effort in to wire it all up.

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dcan 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Patents and licensing, usually

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39543291

	▲	giancarlostoro 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Ah so HDMI is one part of it, that's really unfortunate. Thank you for this insight.

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andy_ppp 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It's tragic that the patent system, that is meant to make sharing IP better, actually is used to extract rents from the everyone... Software patents much like maths should clearly be illegal.

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fidotron 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> I always think just open sourcing the whole software stack for graphics cards would be an excellent thing for hardware manufacturers,

> Maybe I'm just naive

Yep.

There are things hidden in the design of very widely used hardware that would make people's heads explode from how out there they are. They are trade secrets, and used to maintain a moat in which people can make money. (As opposed to patents which require publishing publicly).

If you live in open source land you cannot make money from selling software. If there is no special sauce in the hardware you won't be able to make money from that either. Then we can all act surprised that the entire tech landscape is taken over by ads and fails to meaningfully advance.

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yencabulator 5 days ago | parent [-]

Yes clearly that's why the from-scratch RADV driver was often faster.

The dirty open secret in the tech industry is that the special sauce almost always just isn't all that special.

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fidotron 5 days ago | parent [-]

> Yes clearly that's why the from-scratch RADV driver was often faster.

Because AMD didn't actually care about the Linux driver since it didn't make them moeny.

> The dirty open secret in the tech industry is that the special sauce almost always just isn't all that special.

Only among people where that's true. In the computer industry just look at the M series of chips where it's very clear that their direct competitors can't establish why it does what it does.

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yencabulator 5 days ago | parent [-]

> can't establish why it does what it does

This is weird Apple fanboy head-in-the-sand thinking. The Mx chips have been dug into plenty and are just good engineering, not magic. AMD's horribly-named "Ryzen AI Max+ 395" chip is definitely moving in the same direction.

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fidotron 5 days ago | parent [-]

Right, so we have other ARM64 implementation that are this good?

Bonus points for ones without ex-Apple employees involved in their design, because maybe those people might know something about it.

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michaelmrose 5 days ago | parent [-]

Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite. Qualcomm has been making ARM chips prior to Apple. Admittedly its 4nm vs 3nm for the M4.

	▲	fidotron 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Those did involve ex-Apple people, and there isn't proof that they are quite as good either, but they are the closest that anyone has publicly come. Qualcomm have never actually caught up with Apple performance wise since the introduction of Arm64. They had a very nice 32 bit implementation and were completely caught off guard. Prior to their NuVia acquisition their 64 bit efforts were barely improvements on what you can just license from Arm directly, to the point for a while that is all they were.