Yes, but that does not bother me all that much, since they are tied to that specific piece of hardware. I'm more concerned with whether they work or not and unless I'm planning to audit them or improve on them what's in them does not normally bother me, I see the combination Card+Firmware as a single unit.
> Well, no, but it does have "marketing-ware", i.e. features introduced mostly to be able to say: "Oh, we have feature X" - even if the feature does not help performance.
I'm not aware of any such features other than a couple of 'shortcuts' which you could have basically provided yourself. Beyond that NVidia goes out of its way to ship highly performant libraries with their cards for all kids of ML purposes and that alone offsets any kind of bad feeling I have towards them for not open sourcing all of their software, which I personally believe they should do but which is their right to do or not to do. I treat them the same way I treat Apple: as a hardware manufacturer. If their software is useful (NVidia: yes, Apple: no) to me then I'll take it, if not I'll discard it.
Yes, but that does not bother me all that much, since they are tied to that specific piece of hardware. I'm more concerned with whether they work or not and unless I'm planning to audit them or improve on them what's in them does not normally bother me, I see the combination Card+Firmware as a single unit.
> Well, no, but it does have "marketing-ware", i.e. features introduced mostly to be able to say: "Oh, we have feature X" - even if the feature does not help performance.
I'm not aware of any such features other than a couple of 'shortcuts' which you could have basically provided yourself. Beyond that NVidia goes out of its way to ship highly performant libraries with their cards for all kids of ML purposes and that alone offsets any kind of bad feeling I have towards them for not open sourcing all of their software, which I personally believe they should do but which is their right to do or not to do. I treat them the same way I treat Apple: as a hardware manufacturer. If their software is useful (NVidia: yes, Apple: no) to me then I'll take it, if not I'll discard it.