Compared to what? MacOS/iOS doesn't support Vulkan either. Graphics driver support on Linux is still horrendous, and is a tiny part of the market - most things use OpenGL still. The Xbox uses D3D. The PS5 uses Gnm and Gnmx which are proprietary. The Switch uses NVN which is proprietary.
> Graphics driver support on Linux is still horrendous
Your information is outdated by close to a decade, so check your sources.
And how is usage of lock-in by Sony and Apple excusing MS? If anything all that just highlights who the bad players in the industry are. And MS is one of them.
If you want the latest NVidia graphics drivers on for e.g. Ubuntu, you have to install them yourself by downloading them from the website, and then when you upgrade your kernel, tty1 into the machine and reinstall the drivers because no desktop will start.
I maintained a cluster with 200 compute cards until about two weeks ago. I’m well aware of the flaws in the Linux driver model.
I’m not excusing it, I’m saying that they’re not doing anything notable. Most graphics engines can
If you are gaming on Linux you aren't going to use Nvidia these days (or if you are using it, your next GPU won't be Nvidia most likely). AMD and upstream drivers with Mesa have no such issues.
Nvidia was and will remain a mess, I don't doubt that. But they never cooperated with the upstream kernel properly, so it has nothing to do with Linux, it's Nvidia's problem and a reason to avoid them to begin with.
And compute should get unstuck from CUDA too eventually.
> And compute should get unstuck from CUDA too eventually.
This is just detached from reality. They're so far ahead with library support, and other vendors are not investing in that. AMD's roc* libraries are terrible, aren't documented well, etc. etc.
It's clearly necessary, so it will happen. It's not detached from obvious need to do it. There is work to be done for that, sure. But lock-in is not a good thing for anyone (Nvidia not counting).
Nvidia was very dominating on Linux in gaming too. Now they are not because good effort was put into the open stack. Compute will be next.
That still doesn't remove the tax they put on developers who release for Xbox by not supporting Vulkan there. But I agree, their lock-in was eroded pretty well in the recent times through tools like Wine, Proton, dxvk, vkd3d-proton and etc.
