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@dushman @Suiseiseki nvidia is still a fucking disaster. amdgpu is probably the thing that comes closest to a free software driver for gpus with good performance
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@condret So close, yet so infinitely far away.
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@condret >gpus these days are often to some degree limited by the firmware. fx: you can get more performance out of a rx 5700 by flashing rx 5700 xt firmware on it.
I believe you have fallen for the proprietary "firmware" trick.
GPUs nowadays run 2 kinds of software - a VBIOS to init the card, handle voltages etc and provide VBIOS tables and runtime-loaded software that gets loaded onto co-processors that handle things like below;
DCE - Display controller
UVD - Video decompression
VCE - Video compression
GCA - graphics and compute array, 3D engine
SDMA - sDMA engines.
SMC - Power Managment and monitoring
MC - Memory Controller (memory phys)
CE, PFP, ME, MEC, RLC - gfx/compute
You can get more performance out of many cards by flashing a VBIOS that has more aggressive clocking and voltage settings and higher clock speeds and things usually do work as long as you didn't lose the silicon lottery.
People in the past for years have had no problems patching proprietary VBIOS to get more performance that even the most aggressively clocked VBIOS's available - now such has been maliciously restricted by digital handcuffs, where the GPU will refuse to turn on unless the VBIOS matches an approved signature.
As for the co-processor software, it's extremely unlikely you could get much more performance out of patching or replacing such (unless the original was incredibly sloppily programmed), but digital handcuffs have been applied to such anyway.
>imagine you risk losing profits, because some guys in their basements managed to optimize the shit out of the gpu firmware and now nobody wants to buy your new product
That situation is imaginary.
Guys is basements for many years have been optimizing VBIOS's to the limit and GPU sales have only increased.
If a company was to release a GPU that ran fully free software and people optimized the shit out of it and made the drivers perfect, millions and millions of those GPUs would be sold for many years and some people would gladly also buy newer models as long as they remained free.
One example of this happening was when Linksys was forced against their will to comply with copyright law and release the source code under the GPLv2 for the BusyBox/Linux distro used on their WRT54G wireless router.
Despite being a low-performance wireless router that Linksys didn't expect that many sales on, millions and millions of WRT54G's were sold and people swore by them and only used them and them only (and are still using them), despite how it had like 4MB of flash and 16MB of RAM (if I remember correctly), for many years and Linksys made plenty of profit.
Linksys made sure never to do that again of course.
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@Suiseiseki yeah, i mean i get why they have closed source firmware. from my understanding gpus these days are often to some degree limited by the firmware. fx: you can get more performance out of a rx 5700 by flashing rx 5700 xt firmware on it. you won't get extra shader units, but higher clock speeds, which gives you close to xt performance in many scenarios. amd wants people who want to have rx 5700 xt perf to actually buy the rx 5700 xt. with free software firmware this could potentially go even worse from amd's pov. imagine you risk losing profits, because some guys in their basements managed to optimize the shit out of the gpu firmware and now nobody wants to buy your new product
condret :verified: :ancom:
翠星石
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