I love, need and want CUDA but I need a laptop. NVIDIA pushes CUDA and PhysX on mobile GPUs but never releases drivers for them. I have to hack and mod drivers all the time to get my gateway 9800 GTS to use new drivers. Here I am doing it again for CUDA 2.1.
Anyone else care to chew NVIDIA a new one on this issue?
It’s time for NVIDIA to stop giving manufacturers sole control over drivers. The value they add is trivial and the pain they cause is great.
I installed CUDA 2.0 on my Thinkpad laptop, with the drivers that install package recommended.
It’s worked fine, no need for any hacking.
Agreed. But I think there’s some convoluted rationalization for it that has to do with compatibility.
The rationalization was (and is) that there are potentially vendor-specific power saving features that these drivers would break. With that said, we’re trying to get the CUDA releases to support all CUDA-capable GPUs. Don’t have a timeframe for that, though–hopefully 2.1 final will have it, but no promises.
If those power savings functions can’t be separated in a separate module, it would at least be helpful to make it easier for users to install those drivers on their own risk.