Thanks, this was very insightful.
This RFC is from 2024. I’m not sure when it was merged. But since the NVIDIA driver is out of tree and has to support LTS distributions, it probably means we can get proper support of it in 2032, maybe later, because relevant LTS distributions ship kernels that are 7+ years old.
I think NVIDIA should really work on a long support branch which supports older kernels with bug fixes, and a modern branch which adapts the current technologies to get rid of this uncomfortable situation.
Exactly because of that. NVIDIA won’t be winning that race - not even close - at their current pace. I’m already not depending on NVenc because it just doesn’t work for me under Wayland (error 999 or something which means more or less “unknown error”), Intel QSV does a very good replacement job at no CPU overhead, and even frees GPU resources, with only slightly less encoding quality. And most features where NVIDIA once excelled, now have almost equally performing rivals (DLSS, raytracing, FG).
So as an alternative suggestion, NVIDIA should start getting involved in Linux gaming handheld SoCs/APUs. It’s probably the best push for driver improvements we could get.
I’m probably only going to wait no longer than this year. The costs of upgrading are currently just too high.