The "black box" argument?

I see this used a LOT on forums at the moment as some sort of "holy grail" argument vs NVIDIA's GameWorks technologies.
But I fail to see why this is considered a valid argument?

AFAIK, +99% of all optimizations for games done in graphics card drivers are done with biniaries, not source code?
(The reason I wrote +99% and not 100% is that sometimes a game does something that causes stalls/performance issues in certain SKU's and an actual game-patch is required).

Does anyone here have examples of source code being used for driver optimizations and not the actual binaries?
(I don't care what you "think", "feel" or got "told by your psychic friend" or you favourite PR-fudster, I want actual exsamples)
Because I am unable to find actual examples of source code being used and not binaries?

This thread is not meant for a debate about wether or not "Technology X is evil" or "Technology Z is more fair".
Too many of those, I am simply looking at the "black box argument", because it appears to me that it is being used fallacious in debates.

You're asking a public forum where we are likely not to have a single person who has ever written a single character of code in a driver for nVidia or AMD/ATI to give you specific examples, not hearsay. We might be lucky to have one or two who have ever written code for a game that either of those companies ever gave a rat's ass about. And that's a big maybe.

AMD have told us they use source code and that's why they release theirs. Who else do you need to hear it from to believe it? Jen-Hsun himself, maybe?

Ask UBISOFT for the source code to GameWorks so that you can inspect it.

It's only 'black box' to everyone who isn't nvidia. So nvidia have an unfair advantage in knowing how it was fundamentally designed and thus can better optimise for it.

I mean, this isn't obvious to you?

If the source was available AMD could supply AMD optimized source code that does the same on AMD hardware.

If there is no source available (aka blackbox) there is no point at looking at the code to try and optimize it.

Does anyone here have examples of source code being used for driver optimizations and not the actual binaries?
(I don't care what you "think", "feel" or got "told by your psychic friend" or you favourite PR-fudster, I want actual examples)
Because I am unable to find actual examples of source code being used and not binaries?

Click to expand...

This is funny because drivers are not open source. The optimization the blackbox argument covers is the one that is used in game.
This means that normally there would be something written in C++ or shader specific things. This is where you can adjust

In other words you do not understand what the argument is about hence your weird question and now you know that drivers are closed and not open source.

There was an initial "black box" argument against GameWorks but nvidia agreed to allow source code access to licensees. So that argument isn't really valid any more.

From a programmer's perspective I can understand some of the frustrations with the black box approach. If you have a crash or performance issue that's inside the black box, your only option is to pick up the phone and hope you can get support. In the meantime your development is dead in the water and each passing moment pushes your schedule out further. But the video driver itself is probably the biggest "black box" source of frustration for developers.

FWIW it should be noted that there are open source video drivers from AMD and Intel on Linux / BSD. Valve, of all people, wrote the Vulkan driver for Intel. (Or maybe it was LunarG at Valve's expense.)