Both AMD and Intel provide well maintained open-source drivers for many years[1]. Nvidia doesn't. You need to use closed-source drivers with Nvidia in practice, which causes issues with kernel upgrades, various issues (for which you don't get help, because the kernel is now marked as tainted) and problems with Wayland. The later are caused by the fact, that Nvidia refused[2][3] to support Wayland for a long time. Blaming that implicit sync was a disadvantage for Nvidia is not appropriate. They could've participated a long time ago and either adapt to implicit sync or help adding explicit sync years ago.
Furthermore:
* AMD gave us Vulkan as standard, which builds upon AMD's Mantle.
* AMD gave us FreeSync i.e. VRR, which is usable by others.
* AMD gave us FSR, which is usable by others.
What did Nvidia?
* High prices.
* Proprietary and expensive GSYNC.
* Refused to publish documentation and open-source drivers for many years.
* Own video-decoding libraries.
It is the documentation, drivers and Wayland. But the complete track record of Nvidia is bad. Their only argument are some benchmarks wins and press-coverage. The most important feature to all users is, reliability. And, Linus Torvalds[4] said everything.
If Nvidia has changed its company politics and proofs that over years through good work it is maybe possible the reevaluate this. I don't see this within the next years.
> Both AMD and Intel provide well maintained open-source drivers for many years[1]. Nvidia doesn't. You need to use closed-source drivers with Nvidia in practice.
Nvidia has open-sourced the kernel module "driver", which recently have been declared stable enough for general consumption.
But the kernel-mode driver is only a small part of what you would call the graphics card driver, and the bulk of it is still very much a proprietary blob.
The true open source driver for NV cards is Noveau[1] which works ok with older cards but is slow to support newest cards and features. Performance, power mgmt and hw acceleration are usually worse or not working at all compared to the official drivers.
It has only been a year since NVIDIA actually recommended using the open-source drivers and that's only for Turing (NV160/TUXXX) and newer. It's easier to use my AMD integrated GPU on (wayland) Linux than it is dealing with bugs from NVIDIA drivers.
Rationale:
Both AMD and Intel provide well maintained open-source drivers for many years[1]. Nvidia doesn't. You need to use closed-source drivers with Nvidia in practice, which causes issues with kernel upgrades, various issues (for which you don't get help, because the kernel is now marked as tainted) and problems with Wayland. The later are caused by the fact, that Nvidia refused[2][3] to support Wayland for a long time. Blaming that implicit sync was a disadvantage for Nvidia is not appropriate. They could've participated a long time ago and either adapt to implicit sync or help adding explicit sync years ago.
Furthermore:
What did Nvidia? It is the documentation, drivers and Wayland. But the complete track record of Nvidia is bad. Their only argument are some benchmarks wins and press-coverage. The most important feature to all users is, reliability. And, Linus Torvalds[4] said everything. If Nvidia has changed its company politics and proofs that over years through good work it is maybe possible the reevaluate this. I don't see this within the next years.[1] Well. Decades?
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20101112213158/http://www.nvnews...
[3] https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/11/nvidia-have-no-plans-to-...
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQIdxbWhHSM