NVIDIA Confirms Plans To Drop "Kepler" GPU Driver Support

[illwieckz]

This is why, guys, you should not buy Nvidia. With AMD you can run cards from 2002 (R300) with latest software… and it works.

With Nvidia, if you try to run cards from 2006 (Curie), you have to run Xenial (from 2016, which just leaved standard LTS) and because that Nvidia driver is buggy as hell, not use GNOME Shell. Nouveau not being usable on cards of this generation for other reasons.

Given how the game is built, a game may not run on 340 driver today, that means the Tesla cards. There was still new Tesla GPUs being released in 2011, yeah, while Fermi was already a thing…

And well, you'll say that's old? Yes, and now we talk about Kepler. My Laptop has a Kepler, I have no feeling I should update the laptop to something else, it's fine! I bought it second hand so Nvidia did not got my money, but eh, Nvidia is bad.

You don't NEED to be on latest kernel or xorg. Especially so if you run older hardware.

No, this is a lie to persuade oneself Nvidia is not that wrong. It's false, newer software also bring fixes for old hardware, and support usually gets better with time.

Have you ever done this in your life, running an aging distro to run previous generation hardware ? Have you lived with it ? The only reason to do so is to do retro-computing, but Kepler is not retro-computing.

You can still run latest Ubuntu with latest Firefox on early AMD64 and GPU from 2002. At this point it's almost retro-computing, I'm not saying we should but it's a fact, it works.

And then, on Nvidia side, I would have to run an aging LTS to use my current laptop with 8 threads CPU and 16 GB of RAM, and two SSDs ?

My laptop with Kepler (Quadro K1100M) is very fine, I don't think I have to stick on an aging LTS because of Nvidia. I have no reason to buy a new laptop.

A computer with a Kepler Quadro, 8 threads, SSD and 16 GB of ram is not retro-computing.

My Thinkpad W541 is really OK for today's use. Luckily it also has an Intel GPU so I can just forget about Nvidia deprecating my hardware… Fun fact, the Intel GPU is now faster at doing OpenCL than the Nvidia one… Nvidia seems to be designed to be sold, not really to be used.

On the other hand, AMD is still improving the GCN 1 support in amgpu/radeonsi today.

AMD GCN 1 GPUs were out in the same years as Kepler. GCN 1 have OpenGL 4.5, Vulkan, not retro-computing. And Nvidia is just dropping Kepler, their competitor to that generation ?

[Azrael5]

users are supported until 2024. In the meanwhile, some improvements on the open drivers side should occur.

[Azrael5]

this makes me worried about 750ti , which is next in line. and it's still a perfectly usable card.

and even though nvidia has long term support for older cards, the driver releases tend to be rare and belated. they just want people to buy new cards, and that's that.

The other reason is that new cards have a better support on hardware codification albeit they are rather expensive. 30 series supports also AV1 codification. On Linux, the best solution is still AMD (unfortunately).

[kpedersen]

You don't NEED to be on latest kernel or xorg. Especially so if you run older hardware.

To an extent you do. For example, a lot of games are linked against newer libraries which in turn are linked against newer glibc which in turn needs a newer kernel. However with some fiddling, you can usually keep it on working. FreeBSD has compat libs and Jails and Linux has many things similar.

Though a slightly different argument is that Linux (and open-source in general) is perfect for those with older hardware (either due to economic reasons, interests, etc), so it seems to lose that just for one faulty component in the system (nvidia).

[QuImUfu]

To be fair, Nvidia's support for old hardware is pretty great, for a company that makes all its money from selling GPUs. Older Drivers series are often still updated for new OS versions and you have quite a good chance that bugs are worked around by other software.

On windows, they easily beat AMD and Intel in that regard. On Linux, mesa offers insane "support windows". There are still bug fixes (and **very fast** regression fixes) for cards that stopped being sold over 10 years ago.

However, those seemingly endless "support windows" with mesa may be a thing of the past, as AFAIK mesa is planning to drop older hardware support from mainline, introducing driver version hell back into existence, but reducing the maintenance burden. I am not sure i understood that proposal correctly, tho.

[ThoreauHD]

This is fine. Those cards are pointless space heaters anyway. When they start slitting the 750's throat, up until the 970- that might hurt, since it's the last time you'll ever see unlocked firmware again. Also, they are quite usable hardware-wise.

[guara]

this makes me worried about 750ti , which is next in line. and it's still a perfectly usable card.

and even though nvidia has long term support for older cards, the driver releases tend to be rare and belated. they just want people to buy new cards, and that's that.

Yep, old reliable GTX 750 Ti is way better than the amazingly slow and terribly overpriced in these days GT 710.

Kepler mobile, also known as GT700M series, has already been moved to the legacy status. At least in the machine I own PRIME support in the official driver was broken for so long that I have got used to Nouveau. The performance is OK even though it requires messing with manual reclocking, and the only annoyances are problems with Blender and the lack of Vulkan and GPGPU.

[MadeUpName]

This is why, guys, you should not buy Nvidia. With AMD you can run cards from 2002 (R300) with latest software… and it works.

How is the openCL support working on those AMD cards?

[torsionbar28]

You don't NEED to be on latest kernel or xorg. Especially so if you run older hardware.

Yeah you really do. The popular distros all roll out the latest kernels. If you want to keep your OS patched and up to date, updating the kernel is part of the deal. The term "older hardware" is relative with the backwards compatibility of PCI-E, and the intel quad-core stagnation of the 2010-2020 era. This isn't the 1990's, where a five year old PC is an order of magnitude slower.

[illwieckz]

How is the openCL support working on those AMD cards?

You're right, OpenCL is the shame of AMD: https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute...ment-860318228

The only remaining reason to turn away AMD GPUs today is compute. For someone not doing compute, there is no reason to buy Nvidia at all.
OpenCL with AMD is kinda working, but there is like, 3 complete drivers given your card generation (Orca, Pal, ROCm), and one incomplete meant to be universal (Clover/libCLC). In the end, it's like OpenCL does not exist because users will likely fail at installing them and/or making it works.

That's a shame because when we manage to get OpenCL working, it works, really. But the path to success is just so hostile…

We really need from AMD to complete and polish their OpenCL stack because we should not buy Nvidia, never.