INB4: The rust maintainer for Nvidia “NOVA” Driver has ceased development and left his position vacant because of harassment from C++ devs.
I wonder if this project is more shielded (from douchebags) than other affected projects like Asahi and the like.
Phoronix comments continue to be demented
Wow, you weren’t kidding. Full-on death threats and nazi talking points… over a graphics driver.
Sounds promising
Does it?
I mean, the goal here should be transparent setup, full feature support across all applications and very quick updates to official driver parity. My bar for “promising” may be in a different place.
I don’t think an open source driver will ever fully catch up to the proprietary ones in this case, but for people who want to use only open drivers if it eventually gets somewhat close that might be enough.
I guess? Ultimately Nvidia has like 90% plus market share in dedicated GPUs. This needs a very good solution to be acceptable for most potential users.
I guess for some applications if you get access to hardware acceleration in some form at least it’s not a hard blocker, but unless your machine is very strictly dedicated to just a subset of applications who is paying a ton of money for a Nvidia GPU only to use it partially?
Ah, never mind. I’m just frustrated because I’m part of that 90% and even on the proprietary driver things have been flaky enough to get in my way. I’d still argue that the bar should be set at full usability, not remedial minimum functionality, though.
I think you’re absolutely right at the high-end, but if I have a cheaper or older machine (especially laptop) and I’m not going to play AAA games on it anyway, this driver could eventually lead to decent performance with even greater stability than the proprietary ones.
Sure, I guess? But I also feel like the further you go down that list the more stable things are already, especially if you’re willing to go shopping for distros that offer specific Nvidia-focused variants.
I’m also not super clear on what “high end” means in Linux circles, because a bunch of the Nvidia-proprietary features in question have been in place for over half a decade now and are tied to generations, not how expensive the cards are.
At some point you need to develop the ability to catch up to the proprietary side of things, which means progressing faster than they iterate. I’m not keyed in to day-to-day updates to the point where I can tell if that’s the case, but from the stuff that reaches me organically that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening so far.
Could it though?
I meant in the sense of could possibly, but I don’t have a guess on how likely.
I am extrapolating on the stability thing just based on the language it’s coded in, which isn’t any kind of guarantee, but I think it is a good sign
Hmm I hope the chosen language doesn’t cause performance issues.
Well, it shouldn’t. Both C and Rust can achieve the same performance. There’s also no overhead for calling Rust from C or vice versa. Theoretically, some detail-optimizations look less horrid in C, but on the other hand, writing parallel code is significantly easier in Rust. Graphics drivers tend to be all about parallelism, although I can’t say how relevant it actually is in this case.
Having said that, it is likely that the initial versions of this new driver will have worse performance, until the code base matures more.
Rust can be faster or slower depending on how you write your C code. In general they are the same.
