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The only hope for opensource only if NVIDIA as a company ceases to exist - go bankrupt, for example. They are inherently hostile to FOSS and will never change (they didn't change in last decades, why they would in the future).


AMD and Intel benefit from having the same open source interface to their GPUs even if Nvidia doesn't use it, because it doubles the amount of target hardware for developers.

Also remember that AMD and Intel both make discrete GPUs and iGPUs but AMD has much more share in discrete GPUs and Intel has much more share in iGPUs, so this helps them both.

And then if either of them managed to hit one out of the park on the hardware side it would benefit both. A really interesting possibility there is to put a strong GPU in a HEDT CPU socket with a lot of memory channels to feed it, because then it shares a memory controller with the CPU and doesn't have to copy over PCIe. That could drive demand, and Nvidia can't do that on a PC without an x86 license but AMD and Intel both can.


They may literally be the last holdout among the hardware manufacturers. 15 years ago nearly every vendor was the same. They've all caved over time - can't fight OSS forever.


Except they all end up going shareware like model where the FOSS alone is useless without the proprietary magic dust.


Are you trying to claim that e.g. the AMD open source drivers can't be usefully improved by the community?


Yes, unless the community is now expert in GPU firmware and hardware design.




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