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Comment by lambda | Hacker News Reader

  These are the vanishingly few people who have actually 
  seen the source to a game, the driver it's running on, 
  and the Windows kernel it's running on, and the full 
  specs for the hardware. Nobody else has that kind of 
  access or engineering ability.

One option is to release the source of the drivers, making it possible for motivated engine developers to do this without explicit access to AMD developers.

If they did this on Linux as well, then developers would have access to the full stack, in order to be able to learn about how the lower levels work and more easily track the problems down without simply a whole lot of trial and error on a black box.

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It seems to me, based on this article, that providing support to major game studios and releasing driver updates to accommodate their games is a major revenue source for GPU manufacturers. I guess that's why only Intel releases open source drivers: their GPUs aren't really expected to provide high performance for games.

I guess with Vulcan/Mantle, the drivers are just trivial hardware abstraction layers, so the GPU manufacturers no longer have to make up for the cost of developing complex drivers by doing part of the work on every AAA title.

We might see Nvidia and AMD releasing open source Vulcan drivers, and if not, it would at least be easier for reverse-engineering projects like Nouveau to produce competitive drivers. This at least means you don't have to have non-free code running in ring-0 to use a discrete graphics card on Linux.

Yeah, one of the things this doesn't mention is that, to a certain extent, these issues are self-imposed and the GPU vendors make money from them. In particular, one of the big reasons OpenGL games are so standards-violating is that NVidia consistently refuse to enforce the specs. So software is developed against the NVidia driver's behaviour and breaks on AMD, Intel and open source drivers that enforce the specs, then people blame this on the drivers being crap and buy NVidia hardware. This was a big reason why Wine worked badly on non-Nvidia hardware for a long time.

I haven't seen in this article that studios are paying for that. It seems to me that it is in the interest of AMD/Nvidia to have the best performance for major games, I would not be surprised that they do it for free, and are even asking for getting the games in advance to be able to prepare specific drivers.

It is coming slowly, but there is a tradition of secret. Imagination allows to see the assembly for a shader and published its latest PowerVR ISA. AMD has an open-source backend in LLVM for its GPUs. Someone told me that Sony shipped nice advanced analysis tool with the Playstation, I'm not sure if you have access to the assembly though.

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