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
The community won't benefit from this as AMD and Intel engineers won't touch it, and any other groups who do will be sued into the ground if it looks like they've based their work on Nvidia code, even if they haven't, as they'd need to pay for a defense against lawsuits even if they're in the right.
Nvidia have spent money developing these technologies, and frustrating as it is that many are locked to the Nvidia platform it has spurred open competition - G-sync led to Freesync and VRR VISA spec, Nvidia Raytracing led to it being added to DX12 and AMD following suit, DLSS leading to FSR. Some of these may have happened anyway, but Nvidia may well have accelerated their release and pushed competitors to do more which is good for everyone.
Year of the Linux Desktop... right?
Linux users prefer AMD because of NVidia's greed.
Well buddy , when one day you create your own programs/software after years of hard work , only to find-out that someone hacked and stole your life's work and sold it online in order for him to profit through your hard work , then you can come back and say what you just said today.
I'm betting that if that day comes and such things happen to your own life's work ,you'll start to evaluate things a little differently...
Stop the insults.
Discuss the topic, not the person posting.
Thank You.
While Nvidia was two years ahead of AMD here, I don't think it really influenced the RT in RDNA 2.
It would have been to late to really change chipdesign at that stage, and Microsoft / Sony would already push for it to be included in their next gen game consoles.
Sure it may have accelerated the implementation in DX / Vulkan but that would be about it.
I don't know who would actually profit from this beyond Nvidia if they get the hiveminds at coding sites to improve things or see things they don't. Intel might be able to, but again those drivers I'm sure have been ran on test benches that have already spit out machine code for them.
Its like we get to see in the Diary more than anything.
Why did you have to go ahead and make sense, I really wanted to continue hating nVidia. :roll:
RT-Raytracing is still very much up for debate on whether it's worth the cost. DLSS is just an expensive GPGPU motion-vector-based scaler that utilises otherwise unused hardware in their silicon. The tensor cores are otherwise completely useless die area in each and every Turing and Ampere GPU that were designed for compute and not gaming. You are paying for DLSS in silicon when you could have just had a faster GPU with more shaders in the first place.
Nvidia are like Apple, keen to claim they invented stuff but frequently just monetising and locking down someone else's ideas. I sit here on my fourth RTX card without raytracing enabled, and enjoying the artifact-free native resolution of DLSS-off, RTX-off gaming at vastly improved framerates.
I'm sure there will be some new vulnerabilities discovered from this but chances are high that you'll need admin rights, device manager/service privileges to the machine to exploit it, at which point the machine is already 100% compromised in every way that matters and a GPU vulnerability is the least of your problems.
So if they work on a project, see restricted code from a 3rd party as needed in part of that project they are then contaminated and can't work on a new project that competes with the 3rd party code for some time, at least in big enterprise which will be the AMD/Intel operating environment. Same as if they viewed protected code that was leaked from a competitor - it can lead them to implement things in a way which they would not have done if they had not seen the restricted code, this getting value from seeing it.
Maybe we can mod the UI of that ancient Nvidia config panel one day huh?
Yeah. It sucks so hard. People defend it for some reason, which is even weirder.
Use your graphics card however you'd like, naturally, but from where I'm sitting it's 8-10% die area put to great use.