One thing they should've learned from Nvidia is that it's really worth it for them to invest making their devices function as broadly as possible. Crypto and AI waves both benefited Nvidia much more than AMD partly due to their devices being more universally usable.
That "partly" was worth hundreds of billions of dollars but AMD were cheap/shortsighted enough to hire a few dedicated engineers.
AMD put a lot of effort into supporting common features every GPU should support, like OpenCL/OpenGL/Vulkan. Nvidia put a lot of effort in proprietary crap that only worked on their cards.
For various reasons, people flocked to CUDA and other proprietary crap. Then, when that proprietary crap became a money maker, people blamed AMD for not supporting their favourite proprietary crap.
AMD did the right thing and was punished for it. They're still doing the right thing and people still complain that their free full re-implementation of Nvidia's runtime, designed for completely different hardware, isn't good enough.
AMD is not a saint of a company but it's consistently better than Nvidia, every time. Doing the right thing just isn't rewarded and it shows.
on older (read: older than RDNA) AMD GPUs the OpenGL drivers are so poor that half the games just either crash outright or have colourswap bugs (RGBA -> BGRA i.e. your game turns blue and orange)
On Linux at least you can use Mesa to fix it up. On Windows you're.... out of luck I guess unless someone writes a binarypatch or something?
There are many words to describe my experience with Nvidia on Linux, but "just works" isn't one of them. For modern cards it usually mostly works most of the time, but getting basic features such as "decode H.264 on the GPU" working still requires unofficial third-party wrappers.
On Windows you may be right, I haven't had to deal with Windows drivers for a few years now.
I've seen the bug with my very eyes because I wrote that renderer and I did test on all three vendors:P
Zero debuginfo-related warnings on any driver (except the usual "buffer location is VIDMEM" spam), NV is fine, intel is fine, my (RDNA) AMD card is fine on both Windows and Linux, user with a Vega 64 isn't fine.
We dug into it together and it literally swaps the colours somewhere, and the user said that it crashes randomly on games (confirmed by others, not one-off HW failure), does the same colourswap or have very glitched rendering.
I guess the only salvation is that people usually play DX games under Windows and the bug didn't happen over DX11. But the same rendering restricted to even standard GL3.3 just got BGRA-swapped.
Surely this should be the opposite direction, no? Nvidia drivers on linux have always been trash. If anything, I would much prefer nvidia learn from amd.
The JCPOA was effectively theatre, and I'm genuinely surprised to see someone defending it. Most notably, it restricted where the International Atomic Energy Agency could inspect. For example, Iran had broad remit to deny entry to military installations in part or whole. Further, even when the IAEA suspected enrichment at an undeclared site, it could take up to 24 days to receive permission to inspect. Even then, Iran guided inspectors to pre-approved sections of the sites.
Further, the agreement allowed Iran to develop more advanced centrifuges. The kind which could be used to enrich uranium to weapons grade.
Further, the agreement left substantial nuclear infrastructure and expertise intact. For example, Fordow was not dismantled and 1,044 IR-1 centrifuges remained there. Natanz also retained thousands of operating centrifuges.
In 2025, the IAEA concluded that Iran had failed to declare nuclear material and nuclear-related activities at Lavisan-Shian, Varamin, and Turquzabad, and could not determine the whereabouts of some nuclear material.
The JCPOA allowed Iran to significantly expand its military capabilities and strengthen the regime via economic sanction relief, the release of hundreds of billions of dollars of Iranian international assets, and normalisation of trade (most notably oil). Iran used this opportunity to consolidate power without any material commitment or action towards sustainable cessation of nuclear weapons research and capability.
One could argue that it was the best of all bad options on the table, but let us not pretend it was a good option. Iran has been funding death and terrorism all over the world for decades. Its stated goal is the annihilation of many Western nations. The treatment of its own people is beyond comprehension and description. It routinely practises the rape of virgin women before execution (for things like not dressing modestly, or protesting), so that these young women will end up in hell. If the world were just, the entire world would unite to invade Iran, remove the dictator class from power, and implement democracy.
Just to be crystal clear: none of what I have written states nor implies that Trump has handled this conflict well.
My bad, I misremembered and should have double checked that.
You are right. It was Nokia buying Trolltech and getting the seats on the board of the KDE Free Qt Foundation in 2008 that I was not recalling properly. It's been a minute.
Thanks for catching my miss.
We can all continue to rely on the freedom aspect of Qt and KDE, the Foundation was ahead of the pack in protecting the openness through the risks of privatization.
I always viewed social media as a catalyst, not the main cause. We've always have this at smaller scales / more local scales, throughout the human history. Social media just lets bob meet alice in a virtual plane, while they couldn't meet and share ideas before. But the ideas, even if reinforced by tech, were always there.
Earlier than that, this brand of social/economic/racial/sexual/etc aggrievement and reactionary politics was bred via 80s-90s AM talk radio.
The talking points that were ascendent in the Tea Party era to 2016, and are still ascendent today, were honed at that time in that sphere. Limbaugh said words 30-40 years ago that breathed life into a reactionary movement 20 years later and shaped its theory.
You can keep following the thread back, but I think this form of weaponized aggrievement took its shape at that time, its literal memes were potent and virulent back then, they just needed the right environment to really spread.
Knowing what we know now, imagine how much it would have accelerated back then if the elites hadn’t been able to smother out the Occupy movement. Wild to think about
The death merchants need a new enemy to justify their existence otherwise we might start cooperating with China where both countries could prosper with massive clean energy infrastructure.
That "partly" was worth hundreds of billions of dollars but AMD were cheap/shortsighted enough to hire a few dedicated engineers.
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