nvidia graphics card users, what driver?

[eccerr0r]

Curious of how many people are currently using nvidia cards and what driver you're using - Just comment about your most often used nvidia GPU if you use more than just one brand or card.

There's a huge speed discrepancy between nvidia-drivers and nouveau and yeah I'm trying to hang on using nvidia-drivers-580 on my Pascal Quadro P1000 GPU. Just wondering how many people are holding on or trying to hold onto using nvidia-drivers and sticking with an old kernel to do so...

And if you wish please comment on what you do with your card... gaming? CAD? none of the above? Yeah gaming is the main reason but wanted to also look at CUDA. Alas being a step obsolete already due to droppage of support of my Pascal and Maxwell GPUs are discouraging me from doing so.

This is a snapshot. Closing in 90 days as driver support changes as time goes on.

(Changed wording a bit... still waiting for someone who have an RTX5060 or something.)

[Spanik]

I use nouveau, not because it being OSS but because it looked easier to get working and keep working. Don't do anything fancy. The bit of pcb design I do isn't going to put a strain on any graphical card. The only reason I updated was that the old (nvidia) card didn't support the resolution of my new monitor.

[eccerr0r]

IMHO nvidia did "okay" for their current driver, as long as you're running a kernel and userspace they're expecting. They did do some attempt at supporting LTS and mainline kernels as long as they remain mainline/LTS and not switch to a newer one... OTOH the Gentoo devs seemed to have bent over backwards to get the older unsupported-by-nvidia drivers working as long as you run a kernel that they got it to link properly.

Yeah, just using nouveau makes things easier as the kernel developers now maintain the driver.

I don't have any monitors over 1920x1080 so I'm not sure when I'll hit the card limits of the cards I have... my old ATI GCN1 (has two DP ports) supposedly supports 16kx16k virtual and currently okay with two FHD's. Don't know when I'll ever get a 4k or higher monitor yet, kinda pricey.

[Zucca]

I've stayed away from nvidia ever since I got my first 64-bit x86 PC.
The hazzle back then was too much, and to my understanding it may still be.
So If I were to got my hands on modernish nvidia card, I'd use nouveau. But I'd still be somewhat unhappy for the reason that I probably could not tap to the full potential of the said card.

It's not so bight at the AMD side either, if I want to go GPGPU. The ROCm stack is a mess...

• Maybe I should try it again. Feels like my Radeon VII Pro is just wasting time...

I wonder how's the GPGPU things on the intel dGPU side...

[eeckwrk99]

I've been using a GTX 970 on my main machine since 2015.

I stuck with 535 for a while as I had issues with resume from suspend with 550 and newer. Now I'm using 580, the suspend issues I had are gone (for now...).
The plan is to stick with 580 until it until it reaches EOL in 2028. I can't use a newer driver anyway, 580 is the last one that supports Maxwell.
Then, I'll replace the GPU.

[NeddySeagoon]

After nVidia dropped support for two of my cards, sequentially, in the same system, in 6 years, I concluded that buying nVidia was just throwing money away. So I stopped.

ATI/AMD is not without problems either but the support life is better than nvidia-drivers, so far, anyway.

[saellaven]

I have multiple systems with different era of nvidia cards, all doing different things, including gaming with my 1050 Ti and 1660 Super.

All are running the proprietary drivers (470, 580, and 590 series) on current kernels, though only the 470 one currently needs patching. It's largely been trivial to keep the older era drivers patched to work with current kernels, with me just dropping the patches in /etc/portage/patches/x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-version and forgetting about it.

Coincidentally, I just took a peek there, and I have a patch for nvidia-drivers-319.32 to compile with Linux-3.10, dating back to July 3, 2013. I guess that's just how set and forget it has been for me.

I also have an unrelated active patch for the newly released linux-6.19 so that virtualbox-modules-7.2.6 will compile. Even open source software needs patching with new versions until things settle down. It's not the end of the world and will shake itself out with time.

[eccerr0r]

Seems most people are throwing away hardware instead of sticking with old kernels for the most part?

And most of those who don't want or plan to throw away hardware have chosen ATI?

If there were no driver gurus that figure out how to patch a kernel without nvidia help (i.e. if there were no 3rd party patches and you couldn't write your own patches), would people switch to something else or would you just not upgrade your kernel?

[Spanik]

Seems most people are throwing away hardware instead of sticking with old kernels for the most part?

And most of those who don't want or plan to throw away hardware have chosen ATI?

If there were no driver gurus that figure out how to patch a kernel without nvidia help (i.e. if there were no 3rd party patches and you couldn't write your own patches), would people switch to something else or would you just not upgrade your kernel?

Good question. Got rid of my old card because my monitor started to show colored lines and the resolution of the new one wasn't supported bu the old card. Card was certainly 10 years old then. I guess I'd turn to something else. But how much choice do you have? There is just nvidia, ati and intel. Can't say I have seen an intel card for sale.

[saellaven]

Seems most people are throwing away hardware instead of sticking with old kernels for the most part?

And most of those who don't want or plan to throw away hardware have chosen ATI?

If there were no driver gurus that figure out how to patch a kernel without nvidia help (i.e. if there were no 3rd party patches and you couldn't write your own patches), would people switch to something else or would you just not upgrade your kernel?

I'd write my own patches, and have in the past. I've contributed to the kernel itself in the past (and never had a poor interaction with Linus), but I find that the patches already exist by the time the new kernel is released.

I don't do much programming these days, as my business* is primarily not tech related at all. However, I'm still fully capable of busting out some code when needed.

As for old hardware, I've got stuff that's 13+ years old in active use, with stuff even older than that mothballed. I debate whether I should stick all that stuff up on ebay, with people wanting to do retro computing, or just taking it down to the recycling center. I'm sure by now there are plenty of bad caps and other issues. I think of my Dual Athlon 1800 MP** on a Tyan S2460, that ultimately had a capacitor failure which caused it to burn up the already overloaded power supply connector while I wasn't home. While I came home to the smell of electrically burned plastic, I'm lucky it didn't take my house with it. It was a fun time, but that hardware is ancient compared to what you can get new for pennies now. I guess I mostly keep the old, old stuff around in case I need some vintage hardware to so something that has been deprecated along the way. I should probably just junk it though.

As for most people, they aren't as attached to old hardware as we are... we're the oddballs. They just buy a new windows system, complain about having to move their old files/settings to the new computer, then move on like the old computer never existed. Even the Linux kernel itself has given obsolete hardware the boot.


* though I do manage all the systems at work, with all of the important systems running gentoo, though my employees have chromebooks for things like scheduling and email.

** That was actually my first Gentoo box. At the time, someone had a GSOC project to collect compile times across system configurations and that thing was smoking the single CPU multithreaded systems.

[Ionen]

For a few misc notes for users of the various versions if anyone is interested:

Code: Select all

nvidia-drivers-590 or later (latest as of 2/2026)

This one will "probably" die soon and be replaced by 595.x or 600.x (it's not a production branch, but rather a short lived "new feature branch"). To nitpick, it's also not the latest (580.126.09 is more recent), it just has a higher version number Sometime NVIDIA slacks on updating new feature branches or do not update them at all until the next branch. Because of this these branches are never a stable candidate in Gentoo and can optionally be avoided by sticking to stable.

Code: Select all

nvidia-drivers-580

This one has a (very) long life ahead still, and is recommended at the moment.

Code: Select all

nvidia-drivers-535
nvidia-drivers-570

These will "probably" be removed from ::gentoo within the next 2 years (could be a few months too, don't know), I don't "think" nvidia will keep supporting them for much longer and we'll end up having to drop them due to some security issue eventually. They aren't needed to support old cards unlike 390/470/580 but some users may have used them to avoid regressions. I'd either way avoid these versions with wayland as they lack a lot of recent advancements, but they should still work fine with Xorg.

Code: Select all

nvidia-drivers-390
nvidia-drivers-470

These non-longer-updated permanently masked security hazard versions will have their last supported kernel go EOL in December 2027 (aka 6.1.x, 6.6.x will die a year earlier) and we'll probably drop them around that time rather than patch them downstream for newer kernels regardless of people needing them for old hardware. Overlays will probably step up in packaging/patching them though. 390.x and older are really starting to cause all sort of weird GL bugs with modern software though, and nobody can easily fix closed source libraries.

There's also a last (permanently masked) branch, nvidia-drivers:0/vulkan -- but that one is really only aimed at people needing the in-development latest vulkan features (typically vulkan developers). The driver itself is outdated and lacking a lot of recent fixes (incl. security). They just kind of add vulkan things on top of a old version.

On another note, users of cards that can use GSP (GTX 1650+) likely have a brighter future ahead -- even if nvidia drops support they'll likely have excellent support through either nouveau and nova incl. working vulkan and such (right now that's all kind of WIP esp. in terms of performance but give it a few years -- not that I'd imagine these will ever support CUDA properly if need *that*). Old pre-GSP cards will probably never really improve though, aka nouveau is often stuck in low power/performance mode (can't reclock) alongside other problems and limitations, and the closed source drivers will keep becoming more and more unusable.

[eccerr0r]

I sort of tried and perhaps failed to split things at boundaries of when GPUs got deprecated, such as the Pascal/Maxwells cant be run with the 590 or newer drivers, and I do recall having some GPUs that won't take the 580 driver as well. It was mostly trying to split up how old of a kernel you're willing to run to use nvidia-drivers versus going with nouveau or throwing the card away... or never touching these things at all (option 1).

And yeah I am kind of surprised or perhaps some people have no problem continually porting to new cuda releases when their card stops getting security updates and a card upgrade is needed. I suspect the reason why people are hating opencl as well is that none of these gpus have anything in common perhaps, and there's no way to unify all of them to make them take the same API even...blah

I hope my P1000 dies soon like the dead GTX660 I have. Dead card = dont worry about nvidia-drivers anymore...heh.

[Asch]

I have a RTX 2060 here and proprietary drivers are not an option with musl. So I'm with nouveau and NVK.

And pestering devs all over with my exotic setup and weird issues =P

[stefan11111]

Code: Select all

nvidia-drivers-390
nvidia-drivers-470

These non-longer-updated permanently masked security hazard versions will have their last supported kernel go EOL in December 2027 (aka 6.1.x, 6.6.x will die a year earlier) and we'll probably drop them around that time rather than patch them downstream for newer kernels regardless of people needing them for old hardware. Overlays will probably step up in packaging/patching them though. 390.x and older are really starting to cause all sort of weird GL bugs with modern software though, and nobody can easily fix closed source libraries.

If anyone needs these drivers, there are ebuilds with patches to get them running on newer kernels here: https://github.com/X11Libre/ports-gento ... ia-drivers

[eccerr0r]

Anyone using CUDA? How much of this locks you to nvidia-drivers versions, or is it a recompile away (if possible...)?

[John R. Graham]

I get rendering anomalies on my RTX 2060 with nouveau in KDE/Plasma, so I have stuck with the proprietary drivers. I check every once in a while, but they're still there. I'm running the latest stable 580 series.

What anomalies, you say? Nothing too awful, but the shadows around windows are too large and without the proper gradient I experience with the proprietary drivers.

I've been using a GTX 970 on my main machine since 2015.

I stuck with 535 for a while as I had issues with resume from suspend with 550 and newer. Now I'm using 580, the suspend issues I had are gone (for now...).
The plan is to stick with 580 until it until it reaches EOL in 2028. I can't use a newer driver anyway, 580 is the last one that supports Maxwell.
Then, I'll replace the GPU.

I was in a similar situation until recently with a slightly older card (GTX 780, Kepler microarchitecture), which required the 470- series. As soon as latest stable kernels were no longer able to build the 470- series, I upgraded. I chose the RTX 2060 (Turing microarchitecture) specifically to give me a very long runway to driver obsolescence--and to give me something on which to experiment with CUDA with modern APIs.

- John

[pjp]

I went with "nouveau, because none of nvidia-drivers are supported" even though I think I chose nouveau to simply not have to deal with updating nvidia drivers. I did at one time use it in my desktop. I don't recall any problems, but I don't do anything challenging. Since then, and it has been a long time, it has been repurposed to provide a console terminal. lspci reports it as a GT218 [GeForce 210], so this probably isn't the answer you're looking for.

[Ray17x]

For whatever reason, I can't even get Nvidia drivers working on my machine. Maybe a skill issue, but using the new cards is hard with Nouveau because I just lose out on performance; at least it is OSS!

Anyone have similar problems?

[eccerr0r]

In my experience nvidia-drivers "just worked" at least with recent drivers, recent os install, and a semi-recent card. Feel free to make a new thread with your emerge --info and errors that show up, perhaps someone can figure out what went wrong.