Back in May 2022, NVIDIA surprise released their open source Linux GPU kernel modules, and they've steadily been improving their open source support in general. Now they're talking up all the work to promote it a little more.
In a fresh developer blog post, the NVIDIA team give a round-up of their recent work including how the open-source GPU kernel modules have expanded to include various new features like heterogeneous memory management (HMM) support, confidential computing and more.
They also mentioned again that the plan is currently to transition to fully using the open source GPU kernel modules for the 560 driver release series. Not all GPUs though, with older GPUs from the Maxwell, Pascal, or Volta architectures requiring the proprietary driver. This isn't anything new overall though, as this was previously mentioned to be happening back in May this year but that was a comment in a forum post so this developer post is a bit more official on it.
Just nice to see more open source from NVIDIA.
In case you missed it before as well, NVIDIA are exploring ways to support an upstream kernel mode GPU driver.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
TactikalKitty Jul 20
So is it safe to stay with NVidia at this point or should I still consider buying an AMD card if I upgrade from the RTX 3070?
Their GPU drivers are still proprietary if that's what you're asking. They're finally opening up their kernel modules, which is great, but I haven't seen any plans from Nvidia to open source the rest of their driver stack. But of course it's safe to stay with them if that's not a concern to you.
So is it safe to stay with NVidia at this point or should I still consider buying an AMD card if I upgrade from the RTX 3070?
It's safe to say it's still better to buy AMD if you're on Linux. I have high hopes in NVK and Nova to get rid of the client-side proprietary implementation by Nvidia, but that's probably a few years down the road to be really in feature complete full usable and competitive state compared to proprietary.
That said, opening up the kernel drivers actually enabled all the open source development in mesa (GPU clocking and similar), it's a step in the right direction. So it was an important thing for open source they did, but it's still a safer bet to go with AMD in Linux. For now at least. I still hope they throw some resources behind the open source effort, but Nvidia was always slow on that end.
I for my part think I'll stay with Nvidia for a few more years as my rig perfectly gets my gaming needs done (3070 as well). And I hope to be able to switch to open source drivers in that time completely (currently, with open drivers DX12 support is still an issue with D3D12 and NVK and some DX11 games suffer from real performance issues, games like Kingdom Come: Deliverance are a real slide show, I think due to missing features or improper implementations on the end of KCD - the game is known to have really bad implementation :D). That all will take time and resources. But I look forward to the day.
Last edited by STiAT on 20 July 2024 at 10:51 pm UTC
So is it safe to stay with NVidia at this point or should I still consider buying an AMD card if I upgrade from the RTX 3070?
I'd say you should consider that in the context of nova + nvk. If it can work for you - then may be. But otherwise AMD is still a better option. So if you are upgrading today - no question there, get one of the latest AMD cards.
Last edited by Shmerl on 21 July 2024 at 8:50 pm UTC
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