NVIDIA Preparing To Drop Fermi Support From Their Mainline Drivers

[Tomin]

Isn't Nouveau in good shape for 400/500 series cards? with proper firmware access and reclocking?

No. Nouveau generates firmware that works apart from video decoding and if you need decoding then you can take it from Nvidia's driver but it's missing reclocking and those cards boot often to their lowest power state so they are really slow. I have a GTX 460 1 GB and that boots to 50/100 MHz (core/memory) clocks. Funny enough that's just barely enough for 1920×1080 (or 1920×1200 that I now have) picture – I sometimes notice this noise on my display if I use nouveau. Games that I've tested (not that many) seem to work, but the speed is very poor.

If Nvidia provided the information to make these cards reclock properly then I wouldn't mind them dropping this support. That bothers me the most when using nouveau. The next worst thing might be that Gnome Shell on nouveau is still quite crashy but that's just nouveau not being suited for multiple OpenGL contexts or something like that and it can be improved without Nvidia's support.

[dungeon]

No, they don't. They could continue to use fglrx with an older distro (like Ubuntu 12.04.1) if they really needed it for certain apps/games.

Dropping is nice word that everbody understand and is familiar with, it means that some support is dropped - do you want to change even that word or something? Now of course one can do something about it, but it is still clear dropping

[DeepDayze]

question is why is anyone running a newer than 6 year old graphics card on main hardware that is older than 12 years?

Actually my hardware is 64 bit :-)

I have only one 32 bit system left (an old laptop that I use as a netbook), so yes 32 bit drivers are starting to get dropped so the handwriting is now on the wall for 32 bit systems.

[DanL]

Dropping is nice word that everybody understands and is familiar with, it means that some support is dropped - do you want to change even that word or something?

No. If you say -
AMD dropped support for my card - that's FALSE
AMD dropped future proprietary driver support for my card - that's TRUE

You are one of the last people on Earth that should be arguing about English semantics.

[Altkey]

I have a GTX 480 laying around. Would it be worth donating it to some Nouveau driver developer?

[Mike Frett]

question is why is anyone running a newer than 6 year old graphics card on main hardware that is older than 12 years?

Because one day their computer was working fine and their GPU died. So they bought a new one for an otherwise perfectly functional unit.

[starshipeleven]

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.

And for a good reason, apart from some select crap CPUs anything from 2007 onwards is 64-bit capable.

You sure you aren't just using a crap CPU like Core Solo and with 20$ or less you could get a 64-bit CPU without having to upgrade the mobo too (even then it would only be like 50$)?

I mean, my oldest rig still usable has a pentium D945 (socket 775, 2006) is 64-bit too, wtf are you running in your PC?

EDIT: nevermind I saw your answer to him too late.

[dungeon]

No. If you say -
AMD dropped support for my card - that's FALSE
AMD dropped future proprietary driver support for my card - that's TRUE

You are one of the last people on Earth that should be arguing about English semantics.

World is not black or white, both could be TRUE and both could be FALSE, as i said if somebody choosed to use FGLRX for something (let say semantically "correct" word like CrossFire ) there might be there was not other option

Again, if someone used to use features like that then he have all right to claim TOTAL TRUE drop and no other option

[DanL]

World is not black or white, both could be TRUE and both could be FALSE

We already knew logic was not your strong suit. Thanks for confirming.

as i said if somebody chose to use FGLRX for something .. like CrossFire there might be there was not other option

And as I said, they could continue to use an LTS distro for several more years where fglrx continued to work if that was the case. Crossfire on Linux sucked anyway (read the Phoronix articles about it).

Again, if someone used to use features like that then he have all right to claim TOTAL TRUE drop and no other option

No.

[dungeon]

We already knew logic was not your strong suit. Thanks for confirming.

Ah, Lord of Rings or Panzer General?

Crossfire on Linux sucked anyway (read the Phoronix articles about it).

I take Phoronix articles just as humble opinion of its author at that moment in time, not as pure fact that is written on ancient stone

That said, there were people who were just happy wth CFX on Linux For example this:

https://community.amd.com/thread/200033

Some like these, have ALL RIGHTS to say "support is dropped" and you have NONE RIGHTS to learn them to talk something else, because they have reasons so right to think that way