why do nvidia and amd make their own drivers?

[Anarchist420]

i am fine with them making their own drivers (as long as they dont aggress against anyone) but the fact that so few other people make their own drivers for nv and AMD products really sucks.

i just dont know why neither nv nor AMD encourages people to make their own drivers.

i just dont like the performance improvements because negative LOD bias clamp is a necessity for some games to not look like crap,
we should have the options to disable any and all optimizations that reduce Image quality,
we should have the option to force any depth format we wish to, as well as any ARGB format we wish to,
we should be allowed to disable the fog types we wish to,
to disable TC,
replication of old features like shadow buffers (except only working with all driver AA types rather than just ordered grid or FXAA) are necessary for splinter cell PT to be playable,
forced trilinear mipmaps look good,
and if there are any games that dont use common texel origins and dont work with all driver AA modes, then that is not good either.

in other words, we cant count on nvidia and AMD to make their drivers all that good, so it would be better for others for them to be 100% open source.

 

[hawtdawg]

So that they have control over user experience. They don't want stupid kids on the internet going "AMD/NV SUX" because they downloaded some driver and messed [something] up because they didn't understand what they were doing.

 

[OCGuy]

I'll stick with the company that not only designs the hardware, but works with game developers months in advance to optimize performance.

Unless you want to pay, where would there be incentive for the investment of man hours needed to design, create, QA, and support a third party driver?

 

[BrightCandle]

The only people who could write drivers for the hardware and the guys that design it. There is no standard interface for a GPU and they are incredibly complicated.

I don't disagree that it would be nice sometimes to have some control over poor LOD choices (Arma 3 mid range textures are terrible and I would replace those) and other effects. But most of it is now implemented into the games and not in the drivers. Fog/LOD etc isn't done in the fixed function engine exclusively anymore its done via shader programs and the game engines which means there is nothing the GPU manufacturer can really do about it.

 

[JBT]

Most drivers are only needed to work with just one thing the OS. GPUs interface with a different layer in 3D acceleration and each game implements features differently. NV and AMD are the only folks who know their cards inside and out how would another company be able to do this and have things work?

 

[Sable]

Because they made the hardware?

(another one of your "threads")

 

[KingFatty]

Uh, my understanding is that there is this kind of software known as open source, you might see an example "Linux" where people can make drivers and the source code is available. I think AMD and NVidia are both supportive of this, letting a community come up with driver software?

 

[MathMan]

The drivers of a GPU can not be compared to your typical driver in the Linux kernel. Most Linus drivers do little more than moving data back and forth the hardware and the bottom layer of the software stack.

GPU drivers are vastly more complex than that.

There's the moving data around part. On top of which there's really complex, heuristics based memory management to schedule data in main or GPU memory.
There's compilers that use intimate knowledge of very particular quirks of the memory architecture to extact the most of data locality and cache coherency for that additional of oomph of performance.
There's a million minor HW bugs with trivial work-arounds that Nvidia and AMD and their drivers know about but nobody else. It's pointless to fix them. It's also not publicly documented.
And there's a shitload of game specific tuning of memory allocations and shader compilers, because something as complex as this cannot get the best performance without the helping hand of a caring human being.

 

[AyashiKaibutsu]

Because they made the hardware?

(another one of your "threads")

This

 

[el etro]

They don't want stupid kids on the internet going "AMD/NV SUX" because they downloaded some driver and messed [something] up because they didn't understand what they were doing.

Awesome! :biggrin: agreed.

 

[Cerb]

Had a an OEM box that you couldn't get drivers for, because reference drivers wouldn't work? That can still be the case with nVidia, in notebooks.

Remember the Voodoos, with non-reference high-end models? Oh, drivers were such fun. I remember reading the trials and tribulations of Canopus owners for entertainment on usenet, back in the day .

Some legacy features not working right can suck. You might want to keep some older HW around for retro gaming, which is the entirety of your complaints list. Several games from GoG, FI, on new OSes and HW, take some time and effort to make look decent, and still don't look like they were intended to, with new software and hardware under them. I put up with it, once it's to a sufficiently functional and aesthetically pleasing point, but it could often be better, if I wanted to take the time to maintain a retro rig.

With newer games, most of those features are tied to how the developer wanted to do things, and too integrated into the final product to change like you used to be able to. IE, the features are part of interdependent subprograms the developers used, with mixes of fixed-function and programmable pieces, whereas most of it used to just be a queue of API calls, with a few very simplistic shader programs thrown on top. But it's so much nicer without splintered drivers, when you want it to work, every time, and know it will work in a future OS.

 

[Red Hawk]

...pretty sure so they can sell a complete, functional product. Kind of a good thing.

 

[lamedude]

The open source guys aren't as good.

 

[steve wilson]

I remember about 12 years ago (my second year of uni) I got a radeon 9700 pro when it first came out. The thing would not work with AMD's own drivers and after some research came across someone who had made his own. Omega drivers was the name, I don't think he makes them anymore. Without him I wouldn't of been able to use my gfx cards for a couple of months until AMD fixed their own drivers.

 

[rainy]

I remember about 12 years ago (my second year of uni) I got a radeon 9700 pro when it first came out. The thing would not work with AMD's own drivers and after some research came across someone who had made his own. Omega drivers was the name, I don't think he makes them anymore. Without him I wouldn't of been able to use my gfx cards for a couple of months until AMD fixed their own drivers.

You're wrong in this case: that guy have modified/tweaked official drivers from AMD/ATI and Nvidia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Drivers

 

[steve wilson]

You're wrong in this case: that guy have modified/tweaked official drivers from AMD/ATI and Nvidia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Drivers

That's a little pedantic

 

[BrightCandle]

That's a little pedantic

No not really. All the guy did was take AMD's default drivers and mess about with parameters, which admittedly were not in the controller UI but still in theory anyone could modify. I am not convinced they were ever really necessary despite the fact I used them (mainly because I had a 9500 pro which was software unlocked).

 

[realibrad]

The open source guys aren't as good.

The fact they are so close is quite amazing. The guys dont have access to the hardware like AMD does. The few working on the drivers have gotten pretty close to 50% with no help from AMD.

I would bet that if AMD were to publish the low level details on their hardware, and open up the drivers to the open source community, you would see that gap close and eventually surpass AMD's drivers.

AMD spends quite a bit of money on drivers. If they were to publish data on their hardware, you would increase the pool of people who work on the drivers. There is a reason MS allows people to download and use RC windows to users for free. MS gets free testing and bug reports, and some of the users actually dive into the code and fix problems, all for "FREE."

Opensource code has an advantage, because you have many more eyes looking, and information flows with less restriction. This means bugs are far more likely to be found, because of the numbers of eyes. There is a reason open source encryption is harder to crack than private encryption, even though more "money" is spent on the private.

 

[Anarchist420]

I don't disagree that it would be nice sometimes to have some control over poor LOD choices (Arma 3 mid range textures are terrible and I would replace those) and other effects. But most of it is now implemented into the games and not in the drivers. Fog/LOD etc isn't done in the fixed function engine exclusively anymore its done via shader programs and the game engines which means there is nothing the GPU manufacturer can really do about it.

the way old fog formats look/are implemented is up to the IHVs unless i am wrong. but i guess you are right that fog in the games of today is tailor made to each app. of course, fog and other effects will eventually need double precision or they cant become complex enough (and if there isnt enough precision to make them not have severe rendering error, then more complex effects just wont be used).

anyway, i wish nvidia didnt try to balance IQ/compatibility and performance because neither side gets what they want that way... the end user should have control over that. and then AMD is even worse than nvidia at least when i last used them... performance biased all the way that is.

for those who found the above too long to read... pc gamers know what they are doing, we dont need microsoft, nv, and AMD to treat end users like we are console gamers.

 

[PliotronX]

ASIC/SOC manufacturers make their own drivers, I don't recall a trend toward anything different. Since when does anyone else make Intel Management Engine or Rapid Storage drivers? Creative Labs sound card drivers? They know their hardware best. There are "remixed" drivers here and there but I have had better stability and IQ with drivers straight from manufacturers, aside from the latest Intel HD 4000 driver for Windows 8.1 (and then AMD's drivers for the 7850 just have always sucked)

 

[Spjut]

One thing I really do appreciate with the open source drivers for Linux is that even very old graphics cards are supported.
Since especially AMD moves their older cards to the legacy branch so fast, it'd be pretty good if open source drivers provided compatibility with newer Windows versions.