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eccerr0r
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Joined: 01 Jul 2004
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 Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2025 6:45 am Post subject: Nvidia... nvidia-drivers... what's having a nvidia gpu like? |
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I just got my hands on a "new to me" Nvidia GPU, an old P1000 GPU.
This appears to use the 575-series of nvidia-drivers ... but what does this mean?
I had a GTX660 that needed the 470-series nvidia-drivers but it got deprecated by nvidia. This card was not in good shape so no big loss.
This Pascal card should be in decent shape, was running the 575 driver and it works well. What I'm wondering...
How often does nvidia give up on nvidia drivers, meaning switch major versions due to a fundamental shift in their newest GPUs? Should I expect this Pascal GPU be put on the backburner soon? I suppose the GTX660 is old, but just a few years older than the Pascal (though I'm seeing reports that the two GPUs are similar in speed somehow?) Is this board going to be dropped soon too or will there be some life in it as newer boards still have a similar architecture?
Yeah this board is a bit faster than my ATI R7-250. Noticeable though not extremely faster, as hinted by video cards available today that are 10-20x faster than even this Pascal board...
Last time I was using an nvidia card with nvidia-drivers excepting the GTX660 that I never really used as it was acquired defective... was a long long time ago. Almost thought it was my GeForce4 MX420 old, before I ran Gentoo, and it was a major PITA keeping up with kernel versions. Seems the Gentoo devs have gotten it more seamless which is a good sign, but will I be disappointed by nvidia-drivers within the year? 2 years? 5 years?
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Banana
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 2025
Location: Germany
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| Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2025 7:03 am Post subject: |
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I was a long time nvidia card user (private and work), but can not really remember the card details.
I had never problems with the drivers (used the official one) and all the time it worked over the timespan of 6-8 years. The work card was also some of the workstation quadro cards.
Your is also a Quadro card and maybe this could lead to a longer support of drivers.
It is even listed on the HPE driver download page
Nvidia itself has also an archive of its drivers.
So, for it looks good and don't think support will drop soon.
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eccerr0r
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Joined: 01 Jul 2004
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| Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2025 9:07 am Post subject: |
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Cool, hope this card will last a while. Was a bit concerned because this board is already ~ 8 years old, so need to add that onto the counter. The failure of the GF4MX420 left a bad impression back then coupled with the closed source annoyances, I went ATI ever since despite having to use catalyst (also closed source) but subsequently had a RadeonHD 3650 and 5770 fail on me, so it's not just nvidia (Both the GF4MX420 and GTX660 croaked. If there's any piece of hardware that I have bad luck with it's GPUs, and then hard drives.) Recently I've been getting old/used hardware for cheap so I guess it doesn't hurt as bad when they fail.
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dmpogo
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| Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2025 3:36 am Post subject: |
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| I am nvidia card and nvidia-driver user since, I think 2003 or so. Never had any issues. Nvidia supports its drivers much longer than Gentoo in protage. You can still download from nivida 71.86.15 drivers, which are like 20 years old. |
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Ionen
Developer
Joined: 06 Dec 2018
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| Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2025 4:57 am Post subject: |
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| dmpogo wrote: | | I am nvidia card and nvidia-driver user since, I think 2003 or so. Never had any issues. Nvidia supports its drivers much longer than Gentoo in protage. You can still download from nivida 71.86.15 drivers, which are like 20 years old. |
I don't think that keeping old drivers downloadable is called support. These are broken with current Xorg (let's not even mention wayland), current kernels, modern compilers, and filled with security vulnerabilities among other issues. Essentially useless unless you're using a linux distribution from 20 years ago as well (which could be Gentoo by using the tree from that time assuming can find all distfiles needed).
NVIDIA also officially calls these unsupported themselves, currently they support (as in, still do new releases) the 535.x branch and newer for production branches (535 is probably about to end though, but that one is not really needed for old hardware unlike 470 is given latest 570 still supports all the same cards).
Edit:
On a side-note, imagine the next time they drop support for cards it'll be everything not using GSP (pre-GTX 1650), not that we won't have a driver branch supported for several years to keep them going for a while -- on the downside, nouveau (or nova) support improvements also require GSP so these older cards won't get good open source support either (but that also means newer ones may eventually get great support).
That aside, nvidia has never really given me trouble either  I do replace my PC every 10-15 years or so as needed and don't keep (very) old hardware around much. I'd personally avoid nvidia if I wanted a laptop again though, for laptops I'd be happy as long as the display works and some integrated intel gpu is good enough. |
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dmpogo
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| Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2025 5:28 am Post subject: |
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| Ionen wrote: |
Edit:
On a side-note, imagine the next time they drop support for cards it'll be everything not using GSP (pre-GTX 1650), not that we won't have a driver branch supported for several years to keep them going for a while -- on the downside, nouveau (or nova) support improvements also require GSP so these older cards won't get good open source support either.
That aside, nvidia has never really given me trouble either I do replace my PC every 10+ years or so and don't keep (very) old hardware around much. I'd personally avoid nvidia if I wanted a laptop again though, for laptops I'd be happy as long as the display works and some integrated intel gpu is good enough. |
I don't have nor plan to have nvidia on laptops. One of my desktops is from 2007, with original NVIDIA Corporation G86 [GeForce 8500 GT] from the same year, using nvidia-drivers-340.108-r101 (from overlay).
Works just fine with the latest Xorg and 5.15 kernel. Limiting problem is that the card can't get out more resolution that Full HD and my displays are better That is almost 20 year old card. Show me better support somewhere.
My other desktop is from 2011, but a newer card, NVIDIA Corporation GK208B [GeForce GT 730] running nvidia-drivers-470.256.02-r2 (still in tree but masked). No problems either.
Last edited by dmpogo on Sun Mar 16, 2025 8:04 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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eccerr0r
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Joined: 01 Jul 2004
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| Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2025 7:27 am Post subject: |
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Agreed, support means they will update the driver to work with modern kernels, Xorg, Wayland, etc., not just having it available and forcing one to use Linux Kernel 1.2.11 ... caveat of being a binary driver, can't do much with binaries when ABI changes.
All I have to say is that nouveau is a stop gap solution to prevent an nvidia card from becoming a paperweight. Seems to drop 1/2 to 2/3 of the frames per second versus nvidia-drivers.
I have an 8200 somewhere but its performance under nouveau is pretty awful. I also have a Quadro NVS295 but I don't think that works under any nvidia-driver either...
Granted I have to say that the R200 Radeon OSS support has been broken and also unsupported which is a shame. They work as a simple 2d accel at least but 3d is broken. At least my junky RadeonHD 6350 and 6450s are supported and work as well as the cards work for what it's worth, and still can run on latest kernels. And faster than the 8200's under nouveau.
I guess I'll try to use the P1000 as much as I can and hope it breaks before nvidia decides to stop supporting it, and save my Radeon R7-250 which hopefully will be supported longer.
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dmpogo
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| Posted: Sun Mar 16, 2025 8:20 pm Post subject: |
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| eccerr0r wrote: | Agreed, support means they will update the driver to work with modern kernels, Xorg, Wayland, etc., not just having it available and forcing one to use Linux Kernel 1.2.11 ... caveat of being a binary driver, can't do much with binaries when ABI changes.
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It is a bit of chicken and egg. One can as well say that it is a modern kernel that drops support for fully functional old hardware with working drivers.
That is why after buying new hardware and achieving a state that everything works, I stop updating kernels, as long as possible. The job of the kernel is to run hardware, and if it can't anymore, I am not chasing it, I am sticking to the one that can. |
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eccerr0r
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| Posted: Mon Mar 17, 2025 5:05 am Post subject: |
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It's also got the responsibility to keeping software that's not supposed to run from running... hence the reason for updates. The hope is that the computer is no longer useful comes time new kernels will no longer run on it. That said I still have a lot of old machines running recent/latest kernels and had to dump hardware that was no longer supported...
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