How many lines of code in a graphics driver?

[mr195]

Was just wondering if anybody had information or a link that contains information about roughly how many lines of code make up an Nvidia and or AMD graphics driver. Thanks!

[FilipSebik]

No one can tell you that but you can find out by decompiling it which is illegal so you won't know unless someone knows

 

PS: This is derp answer

[DXMember]

counting the individual shader code bugfixes?

as a reference, programmers in India get paid like $0.50 per 1000 lines of code

 

if you're not counting the patches for games, then your best estimate would to look up a linux open source driver

[ThinkWithPortals]

7 minutes ago, mr195 said:

Was just wondering if anybody had information or a link that contains information about roughly how many lines of code make up an Nvidia and or AMD graphics driver. Thanks!

Not sure. Rather a lot, I'd imagine.

[Nineshadow]

A rather pointless question, since a graphics driver is usually made up of multiple source files, not just one.

 

Suffice to say, quite a lot.

[DevBlox]

Who knows really, it's closed source, protected from the light of day. If you're very curious try calling on some developer from Nvidia or AMD they might tell you, I don't think it's all that confidential to cover the scale of the project anyway. Another option would be to check out open-source drivers that are present in the linux kernel code, that might tell you something, but they are minimalist mostly, the in-house drivers will be much bigger I bet. Decompiling won't tell you anything either, these kind of tools cannot decompile code design.

[dniMC7TBu9sqqC]

What counts as a "driver" is up for some debate. Discounting things like an OpenGL ICD, "control panels", OpenCL Driver, etc. you're looking at something on the order of 10k lines of C and about 50% more buried in header files to produce something useful. Support for multiple generations of hardware, interfaces for your Windowing system, will increase that further.

 

$ wc -l `find ./xf86-video-ati/src -name radeon*.h`
…
10162 total

$ wc -l `find ./xf86-video-ati/src -name radeon*.c`
…
17100 total

 

Talking to hardware is easy, exposing an API—either one defined by some operating system, standard, or something you designed yourself to support "real" development—is considerably more work. The ATI drivers above get you far enough to along to start speaking with X11. That will let you run something like CDE/Motif and is a good foundation for implementing a useful drawing API like OpenGL on top of it.

 

If you're not trying to expose a particular API, you could write enough of of a VESA driver too make a star-field simulator in a couple hundred lines of x86 assembly, or a few tens of lines of C.

[mr195]

Great, solid information, guys. Thanks!

[BrightCandle]

Last I heard the Nvidia drivers were in the 10's of millions of LOCs. The Linux drivers are enormously cut down compared to what is happen on windows and such.

[Bittenfleax]

On 27/04/2016 at 9:12 PM, DXMember said:

as a reference, programmers in India get paid like $0.50 per 1000 lines of code

Is that a thing?! Like Indian call-centers but for software?! What would they write? How would a company trust these people?

 

I am really intregued