[numakerg]

I recall the GeForce Partner Program raised some controversy, although I couldn't say whether or it was bad or good or why.

There's also the issue with them refusing to open source Linux drivers. Supposedly this is because they throttle workstation GPUs to create a market for higher-end versions while reducing the manufacturing diversity, but I haven't heard a definitive source for this.

[bonzini]

> they throttle workstation GPUs

Not sure about this, but they definitely prevent the loading of drivers for GeForce cards if they detect a hypervisor (Quadro cards work). Nvidia claims that it's a bug, and that they're not fixing it only because GeForce cards are not sold to be run in virtual machines. At the very least it's a dubious claim since for a short time there was an arms race as workarounds were figured out and the next version of the driver would detect them...

Of course it's market segmentation by obscurity so it only lasted a few weeks and it's trivial to work around, but still it's quite shady since there's absolutely no ill effect from the work around.

[throwaway2048]

It is absolutely not a bug, Disassembly of NVIDIA drivers shows that its looking for specific KVM signatures, and if you modify those signatures, magically it starts working again...

[Nitrolo]

Not doubting that this is the case, but what's the reason for nVidia wanting to restrict use in virtual machines?

[AsyncAwait]

> I recall the GeForce Partner Program raised some controversy, although I couldn't say whether or it was bad or good or why.

It was about NVidia wanting to make it so their 3rd party GPU partners, (EVGA, Asus etc.), could only sell their popular GPU brands with NVIDIA in them, so for AMD they'd have to come up with something customers are entirely unfamiliar with.

> here's also the issue with them refusing to open source Linux drivers.

It's not just that. AMD didn't open-source their original Linux driver, presumably there could have been some 3rd party licensing issues, but they wrote a new one that is open-source.

NVIDIA doesn't even let others write an open-source driver for them, they make it purposely difficult to reverse-engineer, sign their firmware that they only release with a massive delay and generally refuse to cooperate.

[microcolonel]

> It's not just that. AMD didn't open-source their original Linux driver, presumably there could have been some 3rd party licensing issues, but they wrote a new one that is open-source.

Even further than this, they created such a healthy environment for it that there are now two competing open source Vulkan drivers, and the third party one (RADV) is usually winning by a bit, and is now directly supported (with staff) by Valve.