NVIDIA Dropping Pre-Fermi GPUs From Their Mainline Linux Driver

[Vim_User]

i think that decision has come with the gaming perfromance in mind, specialy steamboxes and the like.. nobody sane would use anything older for gaming anyway.

Really? How does the age of a card affect performance? Do you imply that any of the >400 cards is faster than a GTX260/275/280, just because those are older? And could you tell me which games I can not play with those cards?

[schmidtbag]

I was wondering when this was going to happen. Seems overdue. What I don't understand is why they stopped at the 300 series. The 400 series, from my recollection, is (mostly) the same architecture as the 300 but more finely tuned. And same goes for 300 to 200.

[GT220]

Linus dropped support for 386 in the kernel, MESA also dropped support for many old GPUs, don't think open source supports things forever.

[bakgwailo]

Yeah, Nvidia supports GTX 275 till 2016, after that my options are:

• Keep using the old and vulnerable Linux kernel, xorg (and wayland backend if ever gets released)
• Paying for a new card which will join the legacy club again around 2020

But my options with 4890 using AMD's open source drivers are:

• Receiving software updates till the card dies or totally becomes irrelevant
• Being able to ask for features/questions directly from developers in this forum, mesa-dev mailing list and #dri-devel IRC channel
• Being able to implement missing features, fix bugs or improve performance with the help of other developers and AMD's public GPU documentations

Except that Nvidia has a pretty damn good track record of updating their legacy drivers for the latest Kernel/XOrg release.

[tuke81]

I have Geforce 330M - so now I schould switch to the 304.119 drivers? And what about 8XXX series - 304.119 driver is good for it too?

Like gt220 said there will be legacy 340-driver which will support it. I wonder though what will be optimus support in legacy driver, will it have updates from mainline.

[abortretryfail]

More like worst decision, Nvidia supports GTX 275 until 2016 where as AMD already dropped driver support for HD4000, but I guess you don't seem to understand that.

The open source radeon driver supports the HD4xxx cards quite nicely though. Not having the binary blobs for those is really a non-issue anymore.

[GT220]

No, read the article. Release 340 drivers will be the legacy drivers for all Nvidia 8/9/100/200/300 series GPUs.

Release 340 will be out sometime in the future. Current latest drivers is Release 334.

I have to admit that selecting RadeonHD 4890 over Geforce GTX275 was the best decision in my life

More like worst decision, Nvidia supports GTX 275 until 2016 where as AMD already dropped driver support for HD4000, but I guess you don't seem to understand that.

[dragonn]

I have Geforce 330M - so now I schould switch to the 304.119 drivers? And what about 8XXX series - 304.119 driver is good for it too?

[xpander]

it was quite expected.. supporting such old harware with new drivers is a mess. better improve drivers for new cards to squeeze out max from them.
legacy drivers are still gonna be updated, so those who use those old cards dont have to be dissapointed.

i think that decision has come with the gaming perfromance in mind, specialy steamboxes and the like.. nobody sane would use anything older for gaming anyway.
less bloat in drivers and less overhead probably.

[Kano]

Well, Nvidia is very slow currently, they don't support kernel 3.13/3.14 directly or very late. I can understand that they drop support for DX 10 cards for latest drivers, AMD did that step long ago (fglrx only supports DX11 chips in current releases). Basically when there would be always a current driver that does NOT need extra patches it does not matter so much how many different drivers you need. But it really sucks, when you need to patch every driver on your own, packaging new drivers is faster.