AMD used to have the same issue - their drivers were proprietary and buggy (anyone remember fglrx?). The difference is that they did something about it. Their modern drivers are open-source and mainlined so it’s easy for anyone to work on them. New kernel display/GPU features always come to AMD first, because the kernel developers working on the new feature can just add it to the AMD driver themselves.
Nvidia have open-source drivers now, but they’re still out of tree (so they’ll always lag behind the kernel) and AFAIK they have no plains to merge them into the kernel.
I appreciate Nvidia’s efforts, and their newer drivers are much better than older ones (especially now that they support explicit sync), but they’re just not as good as AMD’s.
AMD used to have the same issue - their drivers were proprietary and buggy (anyone remember fglrx?). The difference is that they did something about it. Their modern drivers are open-source and mainlined so it’s easy for anyone to work on them. New kernel display/GPU features always come to AMD first, because the kernel developers working on the new feature can just add it to the AMD driver themselves.
Nvidia have open-source drivers now, but they’re still out of tree (so they’ll always lag behind the kernel) and AFAIK they have no plains to merge them into the kernel.
I appreciate Nvidia’s efforts, and their newer drivers are much better than older ones (especially now that they support explicit sync), but they’re just not as good as AMD’s.