Why wouldn’t NVIDIA want its drivers made for free, gotta wonder… (might have to do with artificial segmentation, which is getting more redundant as game GPUs go through the roof)
Slowly the hold outs are realising open source drivers are here to stay. I don’t think propriety divers are ever going to go away but now you can have a fully open stack for all the main GPU stacks out there. I suspect more designs are insisting on open drivers and Nvidia doesn’t want to be ruled out at the start.
I think its more a case of trying to hold on to the market shares they own. Its been slow and in very very small pieces, but the fact amd has made their ai gpu stuff open source, have semi decent integrated gpus and have open gpu drivers did some things.
On top of that a company coalition against nvidia for a cuda replacement was started. Nvidia have to be careful in the next few years
They might also want to be in the running for a future Steam Deck or Linux based gaming console. And fully open source drivers is a requirement, especially if Valve is involved.
There’s also the whole thing about how AMD gets improvements from community involvement, and Nvidia then has to integrate that into their closed development cycle. They’re always a step behind and losing out on all that free development labor.
You don’t and likely never will get a fully open stack for those GPUs. Even the latest Radeon cards have a lot of closed-source binary blobs for firmware.
Where the line is drawn between the driver and the firmware blobs makes a massive difference though. Look at the recent case of AMD trying (and failing) to license HDMI 2.1+ for their open source drivers.
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