It was:
- all kinds of problems wrt. the integration of the driver in the Linux Eco system, including the properitary driver having quality issues for anything but headless CUDA.
- nvidea getting in the way of the implementation of an open source alternative to their driver
And they don't see the benefit to create new drivers.
I agree they should help out more.
We could care less about the hacks and cludges baked into the proprietary Nvidia drivers and firmware focused on DirectX powered gaming. The current path Nvidia has chosen with signed firmware locks out open source developers from much of the low level operations of their GPUs.
AMD does the exact same thing and always has. When you see shaders come down the wire you can replace them with better-optimized or more performant versions. It's almost always fixing driver "bugs" in the game rather than actual game bugs. And the distinction is important.
I do agree with you, but that element is something everyone has to do to remain competitive in games. Developers will only optimize for one platform (because they're crunching), and 9 times out of 10 that's a RTX2080Ti.
While yes AMD did similar things when they could, it was way less prevalent (if only because they didn't have the staff necessary to pull it off to the same degree).
Edit: Here's an example of some of the stuff I'm talking about that goes beyond shaders. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040305-00/?p=40...
Hence AMDs push for Mantle then Vulkan. The console like API is the carrot to get people to use an API that has an verification layer so that third parties can easily say "wow what a broken game" rather "wow this new game runs on Nvidia and not AMD, what broken AMD drivers".
Nvidia open sourcing their drivers completely destroys a large chunk of their competitive advantage and is so intertwined with all the IP of the games they have hacks for that I'd be surprised if they ever would want to open source them, or even could if they wanted to.
More docs would be nice though.