GeForce GT 1030 Will Work With NVIDIA 381 Linux Driver, Good Luck With Nouveau

This week NVIDIA released the GeForce GT 1030 as their newest low-end Pascal card. The GT 1030 cards retail for around $70 USD and you can find them in a low-profile version with some cards even being passively cooled.

The GT 1030 is interesting if you need a modern low-profile card, mostly are after good accelerated video decoding/encoding (via VDPAU and NVENC, respectively) for an HTPC box or so, or just need a new PCI-E card for normal Linux desktop use-cases. With the GT 1030 being Pascal based and having just a 30 Watt TDP, some of these low-profile GT 1030 cards are passively-cooled while the others have a small fan. For Linux benchmarking and some fresh video encode/decode testing, I'm looking at picking up a passively-cooled GT 1030 as I am sure many other readers would be interested in that version too. Unfortunately, the passively-cooled models remain out-of-stock while there are several other options at Amazon and NewEgg for those needing a budget card right now.

In terms of Linux driver coverage, with the NVIDIA 381.22 Linux driver released earlier this month, its change-log has been updated this week to reflect GeForce GT 1030 support. So if you plan to get this card for a Linux system, this latest proprietary driver release will get you going with OpenGL / Vulkan / NVENC / VDPAU support.

If you are wanting open-source support, unfortunately, I have yet to see any Nouveau work or any new firmware drops from NVIDIA. The GT 1030 uses the "GP108" Pascal GPU and I have yet to see the needed signed firmware images for allowing hardware acceleration via the open-source driver stack while with Linux 4.12 is where there is finally initial accelerated support for the other desktop Pascal GPUs. But like Maxwell, there isn't yet any re-clocking support so the Pascal Nouveau support isn't too worthwhile. If you are buying the GT 1030, hopefully you are just comfortable using the performant and feature-rich proprietary driver.

Anyhow, as soon as I find a passive GT 1030 in stock for around $70, I intend to pick it up for some low-end Linux graphics card benchmarking. Meanwhile, coming up this weekend are Radeon RX 560 Linux tests.