NVIDIA To Discontinue Linux Support For Some GPUs

[Alejandro Nova]

GeForce 6150 SE: farewell.

I must say this. I'm (still) the owner of an infamous Pavilion tx1000, resucitated with black magic and south bridge switching, that included the also infamous GeForce 6150 SE. And I will say: thank you, NVIDIA, for all these years of tier-1 Linux support. I enjoyed almost 5 full years of support, despite the fact that I bought a DOA chipset. And there is still the legacy support, that will bring me support for 2 or 3 major X releases.

Thank you. Now I'll must go on and buy something else, but 5 years of tier-1 support is more tan reasonable. Not like AMD, who is dropping support for chipsets manufactured less than 2 years ago.

[uaaquarius]

nice that you pick the one x1000 gpu that is just a relabeling of an 2004 gpu core, so yes therefore there is no support anymore lets see what did nvidia maybe relabel and you get no support anymore...

you cannot only view the year, there is a half year between this 2 chips so the radeon chip is a half year older and was only released as a kind of time-buying thing because it seems they could not produce enough new chips from their current generation to also sell them as notebook igps...

1,5 Months BEFORE your 8600m gs came out ( juli 2007) amd released the hd 2400 gpu which is supported till today with the main non-legacy driver.

http://www.notebookcheck.com/ATI-AMD-Mobility-Radeon-HD-2400.3719.0.html

relabeling happens more with nvidia cards so you were lucky at this point but normaly it should be the other way around but ok forget about the wild unlabeling of nvidia amd does that to. So lets say here we have a draw. If you buy a relabeled chipset you should know that its a chip from 2004.

so if you bought in the early 2007 a notebook, you would also have to buy a older nvidia tech which has also bad support now. you would have to use xgl to make current (3d) desktops working. or use nouvou. in the 2nd half of the year amd and nvidia released (I mean the oems) new notebooks with dx10 support that have better support today... so I dont see why amd sucks here more that nvidia? you cannot only conzentrate on the year... you have to look on the months...

if you had bought a notebook with a nvidia chipset in the first half of the year it had to be a geforce 7xxx go or 6xxx go. so you would not have any advantage, and shurely some 7xxx go notebooks were sold in mid 2007 also...

and there is another thing this was in the time amd bought ati, so you cannot blame amd for mistakes of ati.

So dx10 notebook gpus from nvidia and ati gets nearly same love, and they were released at the same time except amd gives better free driver support. And dx9 chips gets not much love from amd or nvidia except amd gives better opensource support.

The only maybe small advantage you have today is with very new nvidia cards where the blob is maybe? a bit better. but again for the price of having no or bad opensource support.

So for older cards amd is better in general. if you compare apples with apples and not different generations of gpus... (dx9 vs dx10 + 6 month releasetime difference)

I would agree to your statement if the dx10 mobility gpus would be come out 6 months after the ones from nvidia but they got released even earlier.

The only point why this hits many is because this x1250 gpu notebooks where cheap as hell so some who wanted not to play bought them because a nvidia alternative would have cost maybe 200 bucks more... but to blindly buy a relabeled thing is stupid. and btw, the x1250 is so slow that you cant play with it anyway so wth would you not wanna use the opensource grafics driver for that??????????

so your example is stupid in several layers.

1) DirectX is not important for Linux users.
2) According to this wiki HD 2400 is not in mainline any more.
3) My cheap x1250 is actually in netbook, not notebook. And yes, I knew about it perormance when I bought it.
4) I do use open source drivers for x1250. Otherwise I can't use any modern Linux distro. On nvidia side it is still posible to use GeForce FX (aka "GeForce 5") with modern distros, thanks to 173.14.xx legacy driver. And those GPU's are ~9 years old now (released in 2003).
5) You can find a good benchmark results for proprietary and open source drivers for x1250 (and other GPUs from both amd and nvidia). Open source is great, but I prefer performance.

[tweak42]

As long as Nvidia at least keep legacy linux support equal to the legacy windows drivers, I really can't complain. For 7+ year old cards all I really need is 2d support for the most part for old workstations.

These new fangled 3d accelerated desktops kind throw a wrench into the equation, but at least on linux you have alot of options. On Windows it's either being stuff down your throat or being stuck on a patchy 11 year old OS.

[blackiwid]

Now let's look at this at my personal angle.
I have 2 old GPUs: radeon x1250 and geforce 8600m gs (both mobile).
radeon x1250 was released in 2007. The latest propriatary legacy driver was released for it in Febrary 2010.

nice that you pick the one x1000 gpu that is just a relabeling of an 2004 gpu core, so yes therefore there is no support anymore lets see what did nvidia maybe relabel and you get no support anymore...

you cannot only view the year, there is a half year between this 2 chips so the radeon chip is a half year older and was only released as a kind of time-buying thing because it seems they could not produce enough new chips from their current generation to also sell them as notebook igps...

1,5 Months BEFORE your 8600m gs came out ( juli 2007) amd released the hd 2400 gpu which is supported till today with the main non-legacy driver.

http://www.notebookcheck.com/ATI-AMD-Mobility-Radeon-HD-2400.3719.0.html

relabeling happens more with nvidia cards so you were lucky at this point but normaly it should be the other way around but ok forget about the wild unlabeling of nvidia amd does that to. So lets say here we have a draw. If you buy a relabeled chipset you should know that its a chip from 2004.

so if you bought in the early 2007 a notebook, you would also have to buy a older nvidia tech which has also bad support now. you would have to use xgl to make current (3d) desktops working. or use nouvou. in the 2nd half of the year amd and nvidia released (I mean the oems) new notebooks with dx10 support that have better support today... so I dont see why amd sucks here more that nvidia? you cannot only conzentrate on the year... you have to look on the months...

if you had bought a notebook with a nvidia chipset in the first half of the year it had to be a geforce 7xxx go or 6xxx go. so you would not have any advantage, and shurely some 7xxx go notebooks were sold in mid 2007 also...

and there is another thing this was in the time amd bought ati, so you cannot blame amd for mistakes of ati.

So dx10 notebook gpus from nvidia and ati gets nearly same love, and they were released at the same time except amd gives better free driver support. And dx9 chips gets not much love from amd or nvidia except amd gives better opensource support.

The only maybe small advantage you have today is with very new nvidia cards where the blob is maybe? a bit better. but again for the price of having no or bad opensource support.

So for older cards amd is better in general. if you compare apples with apples and not different generations of gpus... (dx9 vs dx10 + 6 month releasetime difference)

I would agree to your statement if the dx10 mobility gpus would be come out 6 months after the ones from nvidia but they got released even earlier.

The only point why this hits many is because this x1250 gpu notebooks where cheap as hell so some who wanted not to play bought them because a nvidia alternative would have cost maybe 200 bucks more... but to blindly buy a relabeled thing is stupid. and btw, the x1250 is so slow that you cant play with it anyway so wth would you not wanna use the opensource grafics driver for that??????????

so your example is stupid in several layers.

[Hamish Wilson]

When the news of r600-r700 drop of support came, i was really angered with AMD, especially since they seem to favour newer generations in the opensource radeon driver. To me, AMD wanted to push people to upgrade, they essentially killed the not-so-old generations on Linux.

I am using a Radeon HD 4670 using the R600 Gallium3D driver and I am feeling plenty supported by the radeon developers. Granted, a lot of the staff at AMD are working on new hardware enablement, but that is because they are the ones who can and must push out this work so the community can improve those drivers further. It does not mean we are getting ignored - Hell, I have even seen support changes for my old R200 cards. That is the beauty of free software drivers.

[scottishduck]

God, AMD fanboys are pathetic.

[nightmarex]

With this, NVIDIA certainly gained a former AMD customer...

When the news of r600-r700 drop of support came, i was really angered with AMD, especially since they seem to favour newer generations in the opensource radeon driver. To me, AMD wanted to push people to upgrade, they essentially killed the not-so-old generations on Linux.

Now NVIDIA, not only will still provide legacy drivers like they always did, so their older generations will work on Linux for many years to come, but, something that most didn't notice, they dropped support for much older gpus than AMD. Those dropped are D3D9 gpus, not 10-10.1 like AMD's... It makes sense, that after so many years, these older generations won't get any new features, it is not like that they could gain anything noticable anyway, and most are well below modern gaming requirements.

And to think that arrogant overrated prick told NVIDIA to f*** just because they won't open their expensive intellectual property to him...

No FUD please. AMD does have a legacy driver. Not to mention an officially supported (yeah it isn't the best but it works) OS one.

On the lighter side...

AMD/NVIDIA wolves in red and green would you does us the favor and stop being mean?
I bought all sorts of cards from you expecting to play all the games that were new.
It seems now that my year is up and I need to buy more junk, enoughs enough!
Windows is junk and Apple unfair, where does my O.S. fit into there?
The future is now and always has been you *dinks are too blind but now is when!

*Not the AMD open source team, the dicks M$/crapple blinders on.

[deanjo]

I also pay them for specifications, and the condition I place on the drivers is that they are OPEN SOURCE, because I cant take the crap from worthless blobs that never work.

Please show where they offer such a thing and how you ever thought you were going to get them. I paid for a toaster the other day, it doesn't mean it came with toast for it nor was it advertised as coming with it.

[Kano]

Do you think desktop systems with pci-e have got a real problem? I would definitely say no, as you can get fully supported pci-e cards with vdpau support even very cheap. Since geforce 9 you could even connect motherboard spdif header to the card and get hdmi sound (not possible with series 8). Problematic are as usual only laptops - more or less impossible or too expensive to replace there. The few agp systems in use are completely outdated and will die sooner or later anyway.

[uaaquarius]

That's funny. I pay them for hardware+drivers too... I also pay them for specifications, and the condition I place on the drivers is that they are OPEN SOURCE, because I cant take the crap from worthless blobs that never work.

I'm not sure if GPU manufacturers are aware of those

Regarding the proprietary blob. I had no single issue with my geforce 8600m gs from the day I bought a laptop with it. I used at least 5 different distros (not counting their versions) since that time.