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NVIDIA Dropping Pre-Fermi GPUs From Their Mainline Linux Driver

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  • #11
    Linus dropped support for 386 in the kernel, MESA also dropped support for many old GPUs, don't think open source supports things forever.

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    • #12
      I was wondering when this was going to happen. Seems overdue. What I don't understand is why they stopped at the 300 series. The 400 series, from my recollection, is (mostly) the same architecture as the 300 but more finely tuned. And same goes for 300 to 200.

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      • #13
        Originally posted by xpander View Post
        i think that decision has come with the gaming perfromance in mind, specialy steamboxes and the like.. nobody sane would use anything older for gaming anyway.
        Really? How does the age of a card affect performance? Do you imply that any of the >400 cards is faster than a GTX260/275/280, just because those are older? And could you tell me which games I can not play with those cards?

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        • #14
          Originally posted by siavashserver
          I have to admit that selecting RadeonHD 4890 over Geforce GTX275 was the best decision in my life
          Haha, you must have made very bad decisions in the past, if that was your best one.

          Most of the time you had crappy driver support (catalyst as well as the OSS driver) and after all these years of waiting for a decent driver, you now have an obsolete card which you still can't use to its full potential. I'd rather spend $200 every 5 years for a card that actually has a decent driver, than deal with the crap you had to put up with in the last few years.

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          • #15
            Originally posted by Vim_User View Post
            Really? How does the age of a card affect performance? Do you imply that any of the >400 cards is faster than a GTX260/275/280, just because those are older? And could you tell me which games I can not play with those cards?
            no i did not mean that.. ofc lowend new cards arent better than higher end older ones in terms of raw performance.
            but 2xx series are 2008 ...thats more than 5 years old. everyone who is playing games are going to upgrade anyway sooner or later. by the 2016 they are 8 years old already..thats more than one console cycle.

            as of now you can play every game.. Metro LL and NS2 might have some perf problems on highest settings but still can be played . but things wont sit forever on opengl 2.1/3.x

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            • #16
              Originally posted by schmidtbag View Post
              What I don't understand is why they stopped at the 300 series. The 400 series, from my recollection, is (mostly) the same architecture as the 300 but more finely tuned.
              Your recollection is wrong. Fermi (400 and 500 series) is very different from what came before. It's 300/200/9/8 that are just refinements of the same thing. And it's exactly those which will be supported by the 340 legacy branch. The nouveau CodeNames page provides a nice overview, the Nvidia branches align perfectly according to the families described there:

              NV04 - 71 branch
              NV10/NV20 - 96 branch
              NV30 - 173 branch
              NV40 - 304 branch
              NV50 - 340 branch
              NVC0 and beyond - mainline

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              • #17
                it is strange that the ION/ION2 don't drop support the new drivers ...

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                • #18
                  hi there!

                  This move makes sense to me. As an owner of an 8800 gts (with the latest drivers always) , the newest release doesn' t give me any extra performance anymore (8000 series released back in 2006 I think). So there I cannot see any problem to stay on the 340 legacy driver( which probably will support new versions of Xorg). Even 300 series are now 5 years old cards (supports up to OpenGL 3.3) and in this case too, I don't think that the the latest drivers will give something more (performance, features etc).


                  //Sorry for grammar mistakes etc.

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                  • #19
                    Wow, even now that AMD has had the best performing hardware with open source drivers for quite a while people keep still bashing them as being "unsupported" or "crappy".

                    Originally posted by GT220 View Post
                    Linus dropped support for 386 in the kernel,
                    Because it is slower than the <$0.15 microcontroller in your SD card. Nobody has any legitimate reason as to using them except as a hobby anymore. He actually asked if there was anyone still actually using one they should to reply and he would consider continuing the support...

                    Originally posted by GT220 View Post
                    MESA also dropped support for many old GPUs, don't think open source supports things forever.
                    But honestly: If you are using such old hardware, you can't use many new 3d features anyway and your hardware will be too slow for modern desktops anyway so you are using a very long term "stable" distribution anyway. Of course the same argument is for the proprietary driver, but for the radeon driver it's back to 2002 with the r300 driver. Come on, that were AGP gpus, such hardware is at the edge of being usable for office work...

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                    • #20
                      Originally posted by GT220 View Post
                      No, read the article. Release 340 drivers will be the legacy drivers for all Nvidia 8/9/100/200/300 series GPUs.

                      Release 340 will be out sometime in the future. Current latest drivers is Release 334.



                      More like worst decision, Nvidia supports GTX 275 until 2016 where as AMD already dropped driver support for HD4000, but I guess you don't seem to understand that.
                      Only 2016? Open source drivers last to the end of time. All Radeon cards are well supported by the latest stable release of Mesa 10.1/Linux 3.13 with near-Catalyst performance, or better. I guess you just don't seem to understand what open source drivers are, however.

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