A huge company like Nvidia was once given the single finger salute by none other than the Linux founder, Linus Torvalds.
When it comes to graphics cards, the first name that pops into our heads is Nvidia. However, this company is not only limited to making GPUs, as this American multinational corporation supplies APIs, SoCs, and AI-related hardware and software.
Nvidia is a leading GPU manufacturing company. | Credit: Nvidia.
From affordable GPUs like GTX 1050TI to gaming beasts like RTX 4080TI, this company has surfaced it all for every consumer. Besides, this company has brought a revolution in the Ray Tracing technology. Despite all these accolades, the founder of the popular OS company, Linux, isn’t a big fan of the famous GPU manufacturing company.
Linux Founder Linus Torvalds Calls Out Nvidia
Linus Torvalds was disgusted with Nvidia. | Credit: YouTube/TED.
In 2012, the Linux Creator Linus Torvalds slammed Nvidia for their lack of drivers and support. He even went on to yell the F-word and flick the middle finger toward the long-hailed GPU manufacturing company in a public presentation.
During a speech at the Aalto Center for Entrepreneurship in Otaniemi, Finland, Torvalds made those amusing remarks. When one of the audience members questioned him about the popular GPU company’s hardware support and lack of open-source drive enablement/documentation near the end of his hour-long speech, he used those colorful words. This is what he said:
Nvidia has been one of the worst trouble spots we’ve had with hardware manufacture and that is really sad because Nvidia tries sell chips, a lot of chips into the Android market and Nvidia has been the single worst company we’ve ever dealt with. So Nvidia, f**k you!
In addition to its drivers being unreliable and glitchy, the company never stepped up to formally support certain features, such as its Optimus graphics switching technology on the Linux platform at that time. Its performance with Windows drivers was also not very good, of course.
The graphics driver problem became especially annoying in the 2010s due to the increasing focus on hardware-accelerated rendering and the widespread use of compositing on Linux desktops. Though most of them still couldn’t compete with the proprietary drivers, Linux developers worked on autonomous open-source driver implementations that were getting more and more powerful.
Nvidia Might Have Heard Torvalds
Linux developers have finally got what they have been asking for ages. | Credit: Nvidia.
The leading Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) manufacturing company has recently decided to open-source its GPU driver code, marking a significant shift in policy. This action breaks with the company’s long-standing policy of maintaining the proprietary nature of its drivers. Linux developers and users, who have previously chastised the company for its closed-off strategy, are anticipated to be less irritated by the decision.
When compared to their closed-source counterparts, the company claims that its open-source modules now provide application performance that is on par with or better. These GPUs can now remaster any old game as well.
Along with these new features, the company has also added support for Grace platforms’ coherent memory architectures, confidential computing, and heterogeneous memory management (HMM). The functionality and effectiveness of the company’s GPU drivers should be greatly increased by these improvements.
It was more than a decade ago that Torvalds threw those shocking remarks. However, Nvidia has been learning a lot since that day, and its decision to make its GPU driver codes open source is a consequence of that.
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