Quoting: dibzI'm rather curious about this, can you qualify your statement?

Basically tons if issues due to Nvidia not providing upstream driver (so it had no functional DRM/KMS for years, and even today it is barely working). That caused a whole list of problems, from defunct Optimus (no PRIME) to defunct Wayland / XWayland scenario support. I call it horrible, not excellent. Remember Linus showing them the middle finger? While that's the wrong way to send the message, he reacted exactly on these kind of issues.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: EMO GANGSTERdo the higher AMD cards work better with DirectX to Vulkan then Nvidia cards in steam play

Do you mean general performance or bugs? Not sure about bugs, but AMD actually often beats comparable Nvidia cards in Wine+dxvk case.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: sr_ls_boyAccording to this this phoronix benchmark, Radeon is very competitive over nVidia.
You get more for your dollar.. So, I agree with shmerl.

Drivers wise sure, AMD/Mesa has been very competitive for a while already. However Nvidia still has hardware edge, especially in power consumption. That's what RDNA was supposed to address in part. So let's wait and see how Navi will fare. The fact that Nvidia rushed out their SUPER release shows they see RDNA as formidable competition.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: callciferUnless you are a time traveller, this is merely wishful thinking. AMD might become competitive, it might not.

AMD claim they did, and I don't see why they would make that up. If you want more details, see overview of their new microarch. They basically put people who worked on optimizing Zen to work on RDNA. Their focus was to optimize power consumption explicitly. So Nvidia lost their edge now, but as with Zen vs Intel, it will take a few iterations to polish stuff. With Zen it took them 3 generations to start beating Intel point blank.

QuoteYeah, with the exception of best performance, best power consumption and a decade plus history of Linux (and BSD!) support, there is no point.

Are you even answering my comment? I already said it above. Nvidia has a bad history of support when it comes to drivers. I don't need to explain to you why, you should know it already. Performance of the hardware - yes, their microarch was the best, until today. But unlike AMD they don't have a new one to show, while AMD do. This SUPER release is not a new hardware, it's them squeezing the current one. So competition is going to kick in for real now.

I doubt though Nvidia will be so pressured as to open up their drivers. So I'll repeat what I said - no need for Linux gamers to use it, until they do. Next year there will be more options than just AMD with Intel making high end GPU with open drivers.

Quoting: callciferTo me there is only one downside: it's a blob. There, that's it.

It's pretty much the source of most of the problems that Nvidia driver has on Linux. Total lack of upstream integration. All the rest of its dysfunctions are just consequences of the above. So yeah, that's it. It's the root cause. Until it's fixed, Nvidia experience on Linux will remain subpar, with support always lagging behind. Come back to this topic, once they'll cover XWayland use case. Though at that point, they'll be behind 10 other new things.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: seveni hope the radeon VII will drop in price.... i really want that one

I don't expect it to drop. It uses a lot of expensive VRAM (HBM2), that's the main reason for its high price. AMD don't really have control over that. It's also why they went with GDDR6 for Navi. It's a lot cheaper.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: BeamboomDon't waste time on the less profitable markets unless there's nothing more to exploit in your current market and you need to focus on secondary markets for further growth - and by then you're probably better off defending your current position in the main market.

Not when you are aiming to reach more users, instead of "I want moar $$$". It's not about greed, but about creators increasing their audience. This topic really is about the commercialization of art in general. If you view art as pure business, that art quickly becomes garbage.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Unusual for them to release upgrades so soon after previous iteration, but I think it's their response to upcoming AMD Navi.

AMD finally managed to produce more competitive microarchitecture (RDNA). It's a new hardware implementation of their instruction set (which they kept as GCN). They solved some major efficiency issues that caused high power consumption for them in the past. So in a few iterations, RDNA will be very competitive with Nvidia not only in performance, but also in power efficiency. Nvidia are naturally worried - competition is intensifying.

Regarding new cards, I don't see a point in buying Nvidia today for Linux gamers. With AMD totally caught up on the drivers side (radeonsi / radv) and close to catching up in hardware (RDNA), Nvidia's blob downsides are just not worth it. If you want a card that works properly with the Linux stack, get AMD.

I'll quote the leading Nouveau developer, Ilia Mirkin:

QuoteMoral of the story... just get an Intel or AMD board and move on with life. NVIDIA has no interest in supporting open-source, and so if you want to support open-source, pick a company that aligns with this.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: BeamboomThey are not two different things. It evens out since the larger platform they currently support have an even higher increase in numbers. Think about it: For the relative shares to remain the same, roughly a HUNDRED new Windows gamers must be added for every single Linux gamer. This is why the percentage number is what matters.

Supporting an entirely new platform is no small decision to make.

Related, but quite different. Let's say you have a hundred million users altogether. Even 1% out of that, already means a million users. That's a lot. I.e. probably enough to cover your production costs through sales. Who cares if total number is hundred million? For viability, it's not the market share that matters, it's the size of your market (which means total number of your users).

Or think about it this way - 90% of 10 is 9. Would it cover your costs? So forget about percentages. Absolute numbers rule.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Whitewolfe80Exclusive to Epic store for a year though

Huh? I've seen GOG, Steam and Paradox store releases announced. Where did you see anything about exclusivity?

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/what-we-know-so-far.1163043/

QuoteNOT A EPIC GAMES STORE EXCLUSIVE

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I hope Hardsuit Labs who are working on Bloodlines 2 have someone experienced in Linux development, and it won't be like "ah...uh"-ing a lightsaber for them ;)

View this comment - View article - View full comments