
Nvidia has confirmed a driver bug resulting in a loss of performance on Linux - pferde
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/nvidia-has-confirmed-a-driver-bug-resulting-in-a-loss-of-performance-on-linux.10804
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HarryHirsch
Supposedly with the latest driver some websites (even popular ones like
Reddit) have stopped working:

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1382358](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1382358)
[https://bugs.gentoo.org/639250](https://bugs.gentoo.org/639250)

The complexity of modern computing is truly terrifying.

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leeoniya
there was a quote by some well known graybeard that went something like
"Computers are so incredibly complex, the fact that they boot at all, let
alone do anything useful, is simply astounding".

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simion314
A bit off topic, I do not understand why it is acceptable to have game
optimization put inside the driver and not optimize the game, it seems like
all the time there is a driver update and the nvidia auto-updater thing failed
for me when I tried it.

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FreezerburnV
The problem here is that the games being manually optimized by the graphics
card vendors can have pretty horrendous code. To the point that I remember
reading a post at some point about a large game not even calling glEnd after a
glBegin. So these big companies get the graphics card companies to manually go
through and hack together some specialized code (including the shader code
that will replace the shader code written by the big game company) to fix up
how the game works, and optimize it so it works well.

Part of the reason for this is that it's so incredibly difficult to get to the
"happy path" of a GPU when writing graphics code. (at least, with more
complicated APIs. I think the newer things like DirectX 12 or Vulkan provide a
much lower-level set of primitives to allow the developer to get to that happy
path much easier, rather than doing 5 incantations in a magic circle to get
there) The underlying state machine and code for a driver is incredibly
complicated, and the only people who know how it really works and can view
code at all levels of the software are the employees of the graphics card
vendor. So they're the only ones who can truly squeeze every ounce out of the
hardware/software.

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simion314
I read about the story, but why not contact the game developers and send them
the information? It would be like Firefox or Chrome would have a database of
broken websites, and when you navigate on that website would monkey patch the
site JS/CSS/HMTL to make it work faster to get a big score in benchmarks.

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dogma1138
Because now your hardware can run the game faster than the competition.

