NVIDIA Kepler Mainline Driver Support Nears Retirement, Starting With Notebook GPUs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA Kepler Mainline Driver Support Nears Retirement, Starting With Notebook GPUs

NVIDIA will no longer be officially supporting Kepler mobile/notebook GPUs by their mainline driver. For now at least they will continue supporting Kepler desktop GPUs by their mainline driver...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Kepler-Notebook-Driver-Retire

[Guest]

This is rather lame. The legendary 780ti is still usable today.

[ms178]

Do they want to push people to upgrade now? At least part of their reputation relies on the fact that "good driver support" also meant long driver support.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

One more reason to buy AMD.

[schmidtbag]

This is a little odd for them to drop support so soon. I think it was last year when they dropped support for Fermi.
On the other hand, what else is there to update in these drivers other than security patches? With the way trends are going, the 780Ti is the only GPU of the series really capable of keeping up (was there a Kepler Titan? Because that would hold up too) and I'm sure all Quadros are phased out by now.

That being said... I might want to start shopping for some Kepler server GPUs for my BOINC rig... might find some pretty good deals there.

[131313]

They already gimped performance of Kepler GPUs starting from 415.27. For me Dota 2 + OpenGL and a couple of Windows games + DXVK are slower by 10-15 fps.

[jabl]

Any idea about the Tesla & quadro Kepler cards, are they being dropped as well?

[DanL]

Do they want to push people to upgrade now? At least part of their reputation relies on the fact that "good driver support" also meant long driver support.

It's still long driver support. The 390.xx legacy driver will be supported until the end of 2022:
https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answ...y-gpu-releases

On the other hand, what else is there to update in these drivers other than security patches?

Compatibility with newer kernels and Xservers, which they do update with legacy drivers.

One more reason to buy AMD.

False. There are plenty of reasons to buy AMD, but this isn't one of them. Nothing's changed with this news in regards to Nvidia's driver support model and this news shouldn't surprise anyone.

[SofS]

Do they want to push people to upgrade now? At least part of their reputation relies on the fact that "good driver support" also meant long driver support.

That is the odd thing, if this is what they intended they would have dropped desktop models, notebooks cannot be upgraded like this.

By the way, are there any other examples of support being dropped for an architecture only on notebooks instead of across the board anywhere else?

Also, Fermi is understandable since it had lots of differences from the following architectures, notably concurrent execution. But Kepler is not such an odd beast, even more so given they will be keeping desktop support. Besides, the latest Fermi models are from late 2011 while the latest Kepler models are from 2014, dropping support so soon, in general and regarding when support for Fermi was dropped, means there is something else going on.

[Weasel]

And that's still longer support than almost all LTS distros (except Ubuntu 18.04).