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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 28th, 2023

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  • What exactly does Valve stand to gain at all from funding a CUDA compatibility layer targetting mainly machine learning software? They’re a video game company. Arguably the most gaming-centric thing CUDA is used for was explicitly discarded in the blog post (“Raytracing is gone”).

    Machine learning is massive now and there are many companies who could be interested in funding this kind of project. I’m pretty skeptical it’s possible to make any good guesses with what little info we have.


  • History:

    1. ZLUDA starts as a project to make CUDA work on Intel GPUs, with funding from Intel.
    2. Intel pulls funding, author manages to get funding from AMD instead.
    3. Development of a new version targetting AMD GPUs happens under closed doors with the informal agreement that the source code will be publicly released if AMD pulls funding.
    4. After a couple of years, AMD pulls funding and the source code for the new version is released.
    5. Development continues in the open for a few months, albeit at a slowed pace.
    6. AMD goes back on their word, claims previous agreement wasn’t legally binding and asks that ZLUDA source code be taken down.
    7. Author reverts codebase to its pre-AMD state, looks for new source of funding.
    8. ZLUDA’s Third Life
    9. Anything regarding NVIDIA involvement is pure speculation and should be treated as such.

  • I did look it up afterwards and found out it could also be Arizona, but still wasn’t sure. I figured porn sites would also be capable of mysteriously mistaking an Azerbaijani IP for a Texan IP. I also figured internationally obscure ISO 3166-2 subdivision codes were much less likely to come up than ISO 3166-1 country codes given that people are much less likely to know what they are, plus they are much more likely to overlap with each other and cause ambiguity. But it is very American to assume everyone else knows the US’s subdivision codes and Lemmy probably has far more Arizonans than Azerbaijanis, so I wasn’t completely sure either way.











  • It isn’t significant. Wine already supports the vast majority of MediaFoundation codecs with GStreamer. This is just an alternative backend that uses FFmpeg instead of GStreamer. GStreamer already has an FFmpeg plugin, so this doesn’t add any new codecs to the table. It seems there’s just a long term plan to move away from GStreamer for whatever reason.

    Wine’s MF support used to be much worse, which is why Valve had to do their workaround shader hack. Not sure what exactly the current status on that is, but I do know things like mf-install or Proton-GE are rarely if ever necessary anymore, even with non-Steam games (which I have plenty of).