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The work by Valve's Timur Kristóf on improving old AMD GPUs on Linux

472 points · 97 comments · speckx

  1. wewewedxfgdf · · focus · HN ↗
    If only AMD did this.
    1. Waterluvian · · focus · HN ↗
      Is there financial incentive for them to bother?
      1. emilsedgh · · focus · HN ↗
        One thing they should've learned from Nvidia is that it's really worth it for them to invest making their devices function as broadly as possible. Crypto and AI waves both benefited Nvidia much more than AMD partly due to their devices being more universally usable.

        That "partly" was worth hundreds of billions of dollars but AMD were cheap/shortsighted enough to hire a few dedicated engineers.

        1. jeroenhd · · focus · HN ↗
          AMD put a lot of effort into supporting common features every GPU should support, like OpenCL/OpenGL/Vulkan. Nvidia put a lot of effort in proprietary crap that only worked on their cards.

          For various reasons, people flocked to CUDA and other proprietary crap. Then, when that proprietary crap became a money maker, people blamed AMD for not supporting their favourite proprietary crap.

          AMD did the right thing and was punished for it. They're still doing the right thing and people still complain that their free full re-implementation of Nvidia's runtime, designed for completely different hardware, isn't good enough.

          AMD is not a saint of a company but it's consistently better than Nvidia, every time. Doing the right thing just isn't rewarded and it shows.

          1. Pannoniae · · focus · HN ↗
            on older (read: older than RDNA) AMD GPUs the OpenGL drivers are so poor that half the games just either crash outright or have colourswap bugs (RGBA -> BGRA i.e. your game turns blue and orange)

            On Linux at least you can use Mesa to fix it up. On Windows you're.... out of luck I guess unless someone writes a binarypatch or something?

            I wouldn't call it great support, NV "just works"

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