My guess - tangled code mess without clear control over ownership and bean counters not approving the work of untangling all that to open things up - it's not an easy process for huge legacy codebase.

It's pretty common to license peripheral bits of an ASIC from other companies. You don't even get to look at their blobs or much else.

There have been reports earlier [1] that processing power of some GPUs is suppressed by software rather than the hardware capability itself. It is frequently easier to mass produce similar chips than to have different chips for different priced devices. I had come across comments in other online forums where the users alleged that some software flags restrict the capability. I hope someone else will link those webpages if they come across them

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-gpu-system-processo...

I suppose this is also used for yield quality?

For instance, AMD is known to sell the same actually-8-core chip as a 6-core if the transistor yield was poorer.

I believe this is a standard in the industry, right? You can theoretically unlock these cores yourself, but there's a decent chance it will break or cause other significant problems.

They can move those restrictions into firmware otherwise someone is going to develop a tool that unlocks the driver like people did for the Intel compiler.

this was the case with RTX voice, a simple regedit made it work on non-RTX cards fine.

From my understanding, it used CPU acceleration instead

It would use RT cores by default, but if they weren't available or in use (EG: running a game with Ray Tracing) it could fall back to the older CUDA

That's also why they split it out into two products now

"Nvidia Broadcast" is their "you bought an RTX GPU so here's a shiny toy"

And "RTX Voice" for people with GPU's dating back to the Geforce 400 series that only does it via CUDA

Yes. Drivers represent enormous amounts of work and large parts of the overall development/IP effort in a GPU. Asking why nVidia don't open source it is like asking why they don't just open source the entire GPU. Answer: because then they'd have a much smaller and less valuable business, if they even had a business at all.

> because then they'd have a much smaller and less valuable business, if they even had a business at all.

This does not follow. While GPU drivers are a huge development effort, they are also very specific to the hardware. This is even more true with modern APIs that are closer to how the hardware works.

AMD and Intel both have open source GPU drivers and they are still in business. Are you claiming that their business would be much bigger if not for those open source drivers?

>AMD and Intel both have open source GPU drivers and they are still in business. Are you claiming that their business would be much bigger if not for those open source drivers?

AMD and Intel are underdogs, and benefit from open standards. Nvidia has an outright majority, and as a result their incompatible "standards" benefit them, because it forces everyone to choose between supporting Nvidia (and therefore the majority of their userbase), or "open standards" (a minority).

Apparently nVidia believe that is the case, and they are the market leaders, so - yes?