That’s not hostility, that’s just suckage. Suckage can be solved with time, if years of it on occasion. Hostility can only be solved by the customer base jumping ship.
> The consensus viewpoint is not this so you can listen to HN consensus or you can listen to me.
Can you corroborate your points? None of it really aligns with my experience. Nvidia hardware seems quite popular and effective for raster solutions, accelerated RT, dedicated AI and even low-power handheld gaming. I'm typing this out on a Linux box with an Nvidia GPU right now :P
It's worth noting that Nvidia isn't a saint, sure. They play for keeps, and CUDA is limited to paying customers only. CUDA doesn't have open source alternatives, though. Some things do part of what CUDA does really well (or better), but nobody is making a full-stack replacement. Apple is investing in the Accelerate framework which has almost no industry/datacenter application; AMD is doubling down on OpenBLAS and community support. Intel is half-assing some proprietary frameworks and pushing it into demos for a good look.
It would be great if these incumbent companies would pool their vast resource advantage to write, deliver, test and maintain a cross-platform GPGPU library. But that's a lot to ask, and it's easier to just disrupt the entire market with a single integrated package.
> Intel is half-assing some proprietary frameworks and pushing it into demos for a good look.
My understanding is the likes of oneAPI is supposed to be enable non nvidia gpus to work on CUDA workloads? Is oneAPI one of your these proprietary frameworks?
But them asking for as much money as (they think) you can bear because you’ve got nowhere else to go is. And on a market with a single real choice the difference between the two is of quantity, not of quality. I’d say Nvidia is leaning towards the hostility side these days, although my absolute revulsion for software locks may be colouring my perspective.
To be clear, “hostility” is not the word I would’ve chosen, as it attributes emotions to entities that don’t really experience them. Perhaps it’s more useful to talk about whether the company cares if the customers feel exploited or not; and I don’t think Nvidia does (think this will hurt their sales).
Which... sorry to inject my personal opinion here, but it's not. Software is a finite intellectual product designed by motivated human laborers. The hardware can be a commodity, and the design can be a competitive advantage, but software layer is specifically what people consider "monopolized".
Nvidia is not the only company designing GPGPU hardware, and they're not the only company capable of affording commodity silicon from TSMC. The only high-demand thing they entirely control seems to be CUDA, a software feature other companies are too lazy to reproduce. Maybe it's the rest of the market that's being anticompetitive?
I love Nvidia. Sure it's "closed" in that there's no alternative that uses the same API. But they have wonderful developer support, solid APIs, and are primarily responsible for the rapid rise in GPGPU computing. And the costs aren't _that_ bad. I've been around a long time. The amount of computing power in a 4090 consumer GPU is mind blowing.
Huh? Not sure if I'm misunderstanding but I'm on Arch and I've been running my 6750XT with SD since like February. Got SDXL running a few months ago and have played with oobabooga a bit. Also compiled whisper.cpp with HIPblas the other day.
I also play a few dozen hours of games a month, some new, some old, some AAA, some indie. All through Steam's Proton with no driver issues whatsoever.
You may be running sdxl but according to benchmarks I’ve seen, nowhere near the speed of say, a 3070, or a 3080 12gb (if you want a nvidia product with comparable vram)
