Tuesday, March 1st 2022
NVIDIA DLSS Source Code Leaked
The mother of all cyberattacks hit NVIDIA over the weekend, putting out critical driver source-code, the ability to disable LHR for mining, and even insights into future NVIDIA hardware, such as the Blackwell architecture. An anonymous tipster sent us this screenshot showing a list of files they claim are the source-code of DLSS.
The list, which looks credible enough, includes C++ files, headers, and assets that make up DLSS. There is also a super-convenient "Programming Guide" document to help developers make sense of the code and build correctly. Our tipsters who sent this screenshot are examining the code to see the inner workings of DLSS, and whether there's any secret sauce. Do note that this is DLSS version 2.2, so a reasonably recent version including the latest DLSS 2.2 changes. This code leak could hold the key for the open-source Linux driver community to bring DLSS to the platform, or even AMD and Intel learning from its design. Stealing Intellectual Property is a big deal of course and NVIDIA's lawyers will probably be busy picking apart every new innovation from their competitors, but ultimately it'll be hard to prove in a court of law.
The list, which looks credible enough, includes C++ files, headers, and assets that make up DLSS. There is also a super-convenient "Programming Guide" document to help developers make sense of the code and build correctly. Our tipsters who sent this screenshot are examining the code to see the inner workings of DLSS, and whether there's any secret sauce. Do note that this is DLSS version 2.2, so a reasonably recent version including the latest DLSS 2.2 changes. This code leak could hold the key for the open-source Linux driver community to bring DLSS to the platform, or even AMD and Intel learning from its design. Stealing Intellectual Property is a big deal of course and NVIDIA's lawyers will probably be busy picking apart every new innovation from their competitors, but ultimately it'll be hard to prove in a court of law.
83 Comments on NVIDIA DLSS Source Code Leaked
github.com/NVIDIA/DLSS/blob/main/doc/DLSS_Programming_Guide_Release.pdf
github.com/NVIDIA/DLSS
VBIOS and driver signer next? Is that too much to ask?
This is the only true way. Celebrate or not.
Can't really be celebrating IP theft.
Makes me wonder if this is just a teaser though. Maybe asking for a ransom or more damaging things will be released.
Nvidia is the company people love to hate.
I wonder, what will people say from both camps if it turns out, you don't need any specific hardware to make it running as intended?
I have ideas :laugh:
If it happened to AMD, people would be running for their pitchforks. Probably blaming Intel or Nvidia, for good measure.
Y’all (including the author) realize that the leaked code is radioactive to the nouveau devs and the other companies, right? Or did you all forget how much of a pain in the neck the Windows XP source leak made things for Wine and ReactOS?
In the last decade Nvidia have fragmented APIs to lockout the competition as much as possible, made proprietary shit and charged silly money for it instead of contributing to the sector as a whole (SLI, G-Sync, PhysX, RTX, CUDA, GameWorks to name just a few), contributed as little as absolutely necessary to the opensource community, obfuscated driver features as an anticompetitive measure, plied game developers with black-box, Nvidia-optimised tools instead of contributing to existing tools that were in use for cross-platform development, and all of this is just the headline stuff in the consumer market only.
If you want to know how they've micro-segmented the pro and enterprise market with arbitrary driver limitations for basic stuff like virtual machines, compute, AI, I could rant for days. It's all a massive attempt to cash-grab and monopolise.
You can probably run this logic on shaders but shaders already do shaders, so any additional load will slow down your game, therefore moving this logic from free to use tensor cores to shaders could result not in a performance gain but a performance loss.
Drivers source code is also there. It's a treasure trove of highly confidential info. NVIDIA might as well make DLSS open source (not necessarily under licenses like GPL but something proprietary e.g. like Epic or Crytek do with their engines).
I've downloaded the entire archive and I'm now repacking it because it was not optimally compressed. I expect it to come off at less than 8GB vs 18GB leaked by the hackers.