there is not much to say. is there a way to mine without gpu drivers
Do you understand what driver stands for? It's to increase the chance of compatibility and better or smoother operation, without driver many softwares won't even work, driver is a must, yes you can mine without driver installation but the result will suck so much
What's worse is every generation has its own SM_nn compute model, because 1st gen had 100's of cores, newer gen has +5,000 cores
It's difficult to write device-drivers, best left to the manufacturer, as the firmware is always proprietary the public doesn't even know
It would be a nightmare to develop raw code for a specific card, especially given the fact that NVIDIA ( say cuda ), brings out a new gen every 1-2 years, so the developer would have to start over
The entire reason for librarys is to make it easy for developers, its hard enough to develop GPU code with librarys, very few people can do it,
All the above said, if the trend continues say RTX-3060 where NVIDIA said they would penalize mining, then their could be a move to write full software, but again like I said, somebody would have to steal the microcode source from NVIDIA to really understand how to optimize the instruction set. Or for that matter, you would want to develop your own micro-code on the board to specialize in mining, this is even a lower level than 'drivers'
These days these RTx-3090 boards are some of the most complex stuff on earth, way more complex than the CPU, I guess the same question could be asked "What does somebody just make a GPU for mining in his garage", of course the answer is you would need $100B to make the chips
The worst thing about 'locking in' is it means you couldn't use new boards as they came available, you would be dependent on waiting for somebody on github, then on that level you could expect the developer to ask 50% of the profit, cuz why not there would be no competition. Now the dev feed for mining sw is 1%
It's mind boggling I could see some Bullshit scammer announcing a ETH raw-source miner for RTX-3060 cards, but what would be the life? When you upgrade the firmware the you would have a 'rock'
People have already found work-arounds to the RTX-3060 problem of Nvidia slowing down mining, so its not like their is an urgent problem.
This is all bound to happen, library's are controversial, the younger will think, why not just 'roll your own', not knowing how difficult long-term maintenance is, of course in the crypto world, nobody cares about long-term, they only care about get rich quick
