> The closed source driver still exists but there will hopefully be a completely open source stack (Nouveau++?) For nvidia.

I can only hope they change name to aidivn, like any sane driver should.

I've never properly understood why the closed source AMD driver still exists. Is it substantially different from the open source one? Does it offer anything not included in the open source one?

For the most part, it's just specific support for specific workstation applications that AMD can't release publicly due to some contractual reasons or that those specific changes would be a detriment to a general selection applications. There are a few OpenGL features in there not in the open driver. There's also the DirectGMA thing for having hardware DMA directly to and from the GPU without CPU involvement.

The latter I wish was just a general purpose feature now that things like resizable bar are seeing general support in the consumer space.

AMD proprietary driver actually has only few proprietary bits. Other than OpenCL that was already mentioned there are:

* Proprietary shader compiler that can also be used for Vulkan

* Legacy OpenGL driver optimized for closed-source workstation apps

Worse than I tought:

https://rebatir.fr/post/2022-01-25-OpenCL_on_Linux_state_of_...

The rocm stack has a short list of supported hardware, but it'll run in YMMV fashion on other hardware.

OpenCL, for one.

If you don't care about that, you can run pretty much anything else and performance is great.

I think support for professional users.