AMD vs. nVidia binary driver?

[Thomas Milne]

On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 11:07 AM, Mark Lane <lmlane-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 3:02 PM, Lennart Sorensen
> <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 01:49:15PM -0500, Thomas Milne wrote:
>> > That's always been my question, really:  why not? What is the
>> > advantage, really, to keeping the code closed? I know what NVidia
>> > would say, but aren't they kinda being disingenuous? For the average
>> > person, of course, the stuff they don't want to share is protected.
>> > But for anyone who knows what they're doing, isn't it trivial to take
>> > apart the 'blob' and see what's inside? Or is it encrypted or
>> > something? And even if someone _did_ get a peek at the code, they
>> > would still be legally prevented from using it, no?
>>
>> Well if someone wants to disassemble their driver, they can try.
>> It is huge.  Making sense of the assembly would be very hard.
>>
>> I think they have a lot of 3D optimizing code to make the opengl requests
>> be handled efficiently.  No point passing stuff to hardware if you know
>> it isn't needed in the first place.  If their optimizations are better
>> than what ATI currently has (No idea if they are or not), then open
>> source would let ATI see how they do that.  Of course it may be that it
>> isn't even ATI they are worried about, but other smaller companies that
>> currently don't stand a chance at writing a good 3D driver from scratch.
>
>
> Generally in the past one reason ATI and Nvidia don't open up their specs
> for open source development has to do with 3rd party agreements. Often they
> license technological solutions from 3rd party that they are not allowed to
> open up as per the agreement.
>

Good point, and that reminds me, the other day I was reading that
NVidia makes GPU's for use in military applications like UAV/drones
and such things that rely on high-accuracy imaging.

So who knows what kinda spooky people have an interest in NVidia's code.

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