NVIDIA Preparing To Drop Fermi Support From Their Mainline Drivers

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA Preparing To Drop Fermi Support From Their Mainline Drivers

NVIDIA is in the process of retiring GeForce 400/500 "Fermi" GPU support from their mainline graphics drivers on Windows and Linux/BSD/Solaris...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-Dropping-Fermi-Mainline

[eydee]

With those newest Fermi cards now being six years old

That's reasonable. Unlike AMD who dropped Terascale support while Terascale GPUs were still actively being manufactured and sold.

[brrrrttttt]

What am I going to heat my room with now?

[DeepDayze]

I also noticed that at the same time they are dropping 32 bit driver support for all cards with the exception of providing critical security updates through April 2019. So 32-bit Linux users will have to revert to Nouveau at some point or switch to a 64-bit install if they can. Seems older 32 bit PC's that are still functional are getting frozen out.

Currently I have a GT 730 and using Nouveau...so far this card works fine with Nouveau as I don't have the cash to upgrade it yet.

[Michael]

I also noticed that at the same time they are dropping 32 bit driver support for all cards with the exception of providing critical security updates through April 2019. So 32-bit Linux users will have to revert to Nouveau at some point or switch to a 64-bit install if they can. Seems older 32 bit PC's that are still functional are getting frozen out.

Currently I have a GT 730 and using Nouveau...so far this card works fine with Nouveau as I don't have the cash to upgrade it yet.

Yeah it was covered last year - https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...-Drop-Dropping

[DeepDayze]

Yeah it was covered last year - https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...-Drop-Dropping

Noticed the announcement yesterday that they are finally dropping 32 bit as of now with the exception of critical security updates.

[DanL]

That's reasonable. Unlike AMD who dropped Terascale support while Terascale GPUs were still actively being manufactured and sold.

They didn't drop it. They moved it to the open source driver.
Also, there were rebadged Fermi products that launched in 2014, so I'm not sure where Michael got six years. I would guess there were Fermi products sold in to 2015.

[ElectricPrism]

They didn't drop it. They moved it to the open source driver.
Also, there were rebadged Fermi products that launched in 2014, so I'm not sure where Michael got six years. I would guess there were Fermi products sold in to 2015.

I'm not sure if that counts considering Nvidia contributes very little to Nouveau and Nouveau isn't anywhere near a 1:1 or even a 10:1 replacement for the nvidia blob. Nvidia really needs to do a open source driver like AMD.

[dungeon]

They didn't drop it. They moved it to the open source driver.

Yeah, It is not DAL3 but DC

Problem with AMD is that user have no idea about anything... they don't wrote proper changelogs, never announced eol timeframe like this when driver would be dropped, etc... user before something happens don't even know if Intel-G is really Vega or that "Vega" might be Polaris instead

Intel's Kaby Lake-G mystery: Why Radeon Vega M may be more Polaris than Vega

[Dukenukemx]

I'm not sure if that counts considering Nvidia contributes very little to Nouveau and Nouveau isn't anywhere near a 1:1 or even a 10:1 replacement for the nvidia blob. Nvidia really needs to do a open source driver like AMD.

I have a few older legacy Nvidia products, and they're all stuck on the Legacy Geforce 304 driver. Some of them work fine with Nouveau, and some of them crash constantly with Nouveau unless I use the Geforce 304 driver. But the 304 driver isn't perfect either as it boots with ACPI errors and etc. At least it works, but with older AMD/ATI hardware you just use the open source driver and you're good to go. In most cases just installing your favorite distro is enough to get it working.