Samsung teases investment to get into the GPU game Samsung has teased its entry into the GPU industry, but its plans are obscure. News of the Korean giant's intention to build GPUs emerged in its FY 2023 Corporate Governance Report [PDF], which records a March 19, 2024, meeting of its Management Committee during which "Investment in GPU business" was approved. Aside from that …
The GPU is useless without software to drive it.
That is why NVIDIA dominates the market now. They wrote decent drivers and learned from that to make their own hardware better. Yeah, it's a cost but if you want to be #1 you can't leave that to others.
Make the hardware and ignore the software and you end up failing as Intel did. Intel made the same mistake earlier with Itanic (Doh!).
AMD did slightly better here but their drivers still sucked compared to NVIDIA's.
I will admit that the three times I bought an Nvidia GPU (2007, 2012-ish, 2016-ish) quality of drivers (esp. on GNU/Linux) was my main concern. However, right now the big advantage Nvidia has for all non-home/non-mobile workloads is CUDA (not necessarily because it's better than OpenCL et al, but due to being first and therefore having lots more compatible software). On the home PC market, Nvidia (and AMD) have the advantage of having humongous piles of workarounds for specific games (which Intel should've also had from their iGPUs...), and AMD currently also have decent drivers. Still, Intel launching a GPU with essentially no driver support for DirectX < 12[1] was one of the decisions of all time. Props to Nvidia for having the best money-no-object hardware of the current generation (RTX 40X0), and likely the next one too.
IFF Samsung is throwing their hat on designing/building their own GPUs for the mobile market, driver support should be easier than on PC. The mobile GPU market is already much more heterogeneous than PC GPUs, and the chances of Google/Phone Manufacturers doing patch releases of their GFX stack to support badly coded games is much lower.
PD: From hearsay (and some personal experience, esp. near 2007), ATI/AMD drivers varied between almost tolerable (mostly on Windows, usually near or after the cards went EOL) to unmitigated disasters (esp. on GNU/Linux). It only got better around late 2010s, to where all my daily PCs sport integrated or external AMD GPUs and I couldn't be happier about them. (The only remaining issue I personally had -- also with Nvidia but not with Intel iGPUs -- was hangs after kexec, but it seems to be finally fixed).
[1]: Intel straight up use vkd3d/dxvk (as seen in Wine and Proton) for DirectX 9/10/11 support.
Actually what happened was, Nvidia's drivers also suck... but all games companies primarily target Nvidia card owners. So it "seems" that Nvidia drivers are better than they are.
Ironically, since all the consoles went AMD, this problem has largely disappeared...
> Nvidia's drivers also suck...
I think that's a bit unfair to Nvidia.
There's a quote from Carmack, back in the early days of 3d acceleration, about the relative quality of drivers. When it came to AMD (nee ATi), when his code didn't work, it was generally due to a fault in their drivers. When it came to Nvidia, it was a bug in his code...
Admittedly, both companies have come a long way since those days, as has 3D technology itself. And there's now a bewildering array of APIs and versions to deal with; so much so that Intel threw their hands up when it came to supporting legacy Direct X versions in hardware, and instead opted to utilise a software translation mechanism.
(To be fair, even a low end DX12 part is probably at the higher end of what DX9-era hardware was capable of...)
But while Nvidia have never been perfect, they've generally been better than their rivals.
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