Oh, haha I was confused for a second about the Pascal language 🤭
Getting dumped to CLI is just a standard Arch experience in updating anything isn’t it? You asked for it, you got it.
According to the Steam HW survey around 6% of users are still using Pascal (10xx) GPUs. That’s about 8.4 million GPUs losing proprietary driver support. What a waste.
GPU % 1060 1.86 1050ti 1.43 1070 0.78 1050 0.67 1080 0.5 1080ti 0.38 1070ti 0.24Fixed: 1050 was noted as 1050ti
Doubly evil given that GPU prices are still ridiculous.
Interesting, I’m about to move one more machine to Linux (the one that’s been off for a while) and I’ve got exactly 10xx GPU inside lol.
8.4 million GPUs losing proprietary driver support.
Are they all on Linux though?
Are they supported longer on the windows driver?
Apparently? Title only mentions dropping the support on Linux. 🤷♂️
You don’t have to updare your drivers though, isn’t this normal with older hardware?
I believe the same SW version is packaged. Nvidia said they’d drop support in the 580 release, but they shifted it to 590 now.
The arch issues are another layer of headache by the maintainers changing the package names and people breaking their systems on update when a non-compatible version is pulled replacing the one with still pascal support in it.
Not really a problem of Arch, but of the driver release model, then, IMO. You’d have this issue on Windows too if you just upgraded blindly, right? It’s Nvidia’s fault for not naming their drivers, or versioning/naming them in a way that indicates support for a set of architectures. Not just an incrementing number willy nilly.
It’s 2025, can we not display a warning message in pacman? Or letting it switch from nvidia-590 to nvidia-legacy?
I’m not an arch user, I admit, I don’t like footguns.
Nvidia was awful before the LLM craze, now they’re awful AND evil.
The last time I updated my driver, BG3 didn’t start anymore. So I really could not care less about driver updates for my 8 years old card.
But still, fuck nvidia.
Fuck, what do I do when they inevitably discontinue support for 20xx? Just cry and accept that I no longer have a computer, as every component costs as much as a house? D:
Surely there’s a way to keep the older driver on Linux, its absurdly easy on Windows.
how? when the linux kernel looks at you funny if you even mention kernel interface stability within a 100km radius
Keep using it, you don’t need them to support it to keep using it. All old driver versions still exist.
I’ve had so many problems with Nvidia GPUs on Linux over the years that I now refuse to buy anything Nvidia. AMD cards work flawlessly and get very long-term support.
I just replaced my old 1060 with a Radeon 6600 rx myself.
Same. Refuse to use NVIDIA going forward for anything.
I’m with you, I know we’ve had a lot of recent Linux converts, but I don’t get why so many who’ve used Linux for years still buy Nvidia.
Like yeah, there’s going to be some cool stuff, but it’s going to be clunky and temporary.
When people switch to Linux they don’t do a lot of research beforehand. I, for one, didn’t know that Nvidia doesn’t work well with it until I had been using it for years.
It’s a good way for people to learn about fully hostile companies to the linux ecosystem.
I wasted days of my life getting nVidia to work on Linux. Too much stress. Screw that. Better ways to spend time. If I can’t game, that’s OK too.
I switched from a 3080 to a 7900 xt. It’s one of the better decisions I’ve made even though on paper the performances are not too far away.
I’m told AMD works better with Linux, but I haven’t tried it myself.
AMD is and has been much more friendly towards linux than nivdia. I run mine in proxmox passing through to linux and windows gaming VMs. AMD has invested in open source drivers.
https://thetechylife.com/does-amd-support-linux/
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/linus-torvalds-says-f-k-you-to-nvidia/
AMD is plug and play on Linux. With my 7800XT there isn’t a driver to install. Only issue is that AMD doesn’t make anything that competes with the 5080/5090.
Only “issue” is that AMD doesn’t make anything that competes with the 5080/5090.
And do you really need the performance of a 5080? Certainly not that of a 5090.
My 9070 XT runs everything I need at perfectly acceptable rates on maximum settings. AAA games among them.
That’s such a bad way to look at it. I would’ve bought a 5090 if I could afford it because I want to hold onto the 5090 for almost a decade like I did with my 1080. Depending on prices, it doesn’t make sense to upgrade twice in 10 years because you bought a budget option, and then be stuck trying to sell a budget card. 5090s will hold their value for years to come. Good luck playing AAA titles maxed out in 5 years on a 7800XT.
Generally, you’ll get better results by spending half as much on GPUs twice as often. Games generally aren’t made expecting all their players to have a current-gen top-of-the-line card, so you don’t benefit much from having a top-of-the-line card at first, and then a couple of generations later, usually there’s a card that outperforms the previous top-of-the-line card that costs half as much as it did, so you end up with a better card in the long run.
Yeah, I am looking at spending less than I did before though. But when will an under £200 card give like double the performance of a 2070? I don’t want to spend that much for +20%. Unless my current card dies there is little reason to upgrade.
I don’t want to play AAA games now, why would I want to with 5 more years of further enshitification?
That’s why I’m not on bleeding edge.
Sounds like it’s time to switch out the 1080ti for a 9070xt. Been almost 10 years, probably due for an upgrade.
I will miss having that CUDA compatibility on hand for matlab tinkering. I wonder if any translation layers are working yet?
https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA I’ve heard is doing pretty well
He tried to warn y’all…
whose this and what speaking/event was it, do you remember?
That’s Linus Torvalds, the guy who made the Linux kernel. I think this was some interview he did, but I’m not sure.
Here is old man me trying to fogure out what PASCAL code there is in the linux codebase, and how NVIDIA gets to drop it.
Man that was my first thought and I didn’t even use it 😂
Those are the GPUs they were selling — and a whole lot of people were buying — until about five years ago. Not something you’d expect to suddenly be unsupported. I guess Nvidia must be going broke or something, they can’t even afford to maintain their driver software any more.
Nvidia isn’t exactly broke…I thought they were the most valuable company in the world? Or the second, sometimes they trade places with Apple
I don’t get what needs support, exactly. Maybe I’m not yet fully awake, which tends to make me stupid. But the graphics card doesn’t change. The driver translates OS commands to GPU commands, so if the target is not moving, changes can only be forced by changes to the OS, which puts the responsibility on the Kernel devs. What am I missing?
The driver needs to interface with the OS kernel which does change, so the driver needs updates. The old Nvidia driver is not open source or free software, so nobody other than Nvidia themselves can practically or legally do it. Nvidia could of course change that if they don’t want to do even the bare minimum of maintenance.
The driver needs to interface with the OS kernel which does change, so the driver needs updates.
That’s a false implication. The OS just needs to keep the interface to the kernel stable, just like it has to with every other piece of hardware or software. You don’t just double the current you send over USB and expect cable manufacturers to adapt. As the consumer of the API (which the driver is from the kernel’s point of view) you deal with what you get and don’t make demands to the API provider.
Device drivers are not like other software in at least one important way: They have access to and depend on kernel internals which are not visible to applications, and they need to be rebuilt when those change. Something as huge and complicated as a GPU driver depends on quite a lot of them. The kernel does not provide a stable binary interface for drivers so they will frequently need to be recompiled to work with new versions of linux, and then less frequently the source code also needs modification as things are changed, added to, and improved.
This is not unique to Linux, it’s pretty normal. But it is a deliberate choice that its developers made, and people generally seem to think it was a good one.
They have access to and depend on kernel internals
That sounds like a stupid idea to me. But what do I know? I live in the ivory tower of application development where APIs are well-defined and stable.
Thanks for explaining.
Pascal is coming up on 10 years old. You can’t expect companies to support things forever.
Make them open source the drivers so the community can do it then.
They started 9 years ago, but they remained popular into 2020 and according to wikipedia the last new pascal model was released in 2022. The 1080 and the 1060 are both still pretty high up on the Steam list of the most common GPUs.
What model came out in 2022? The newest I could find was the GT 1010 from 2021 (which is more of a video adapter than an actual graphics card) but that’s the exception. The bulk of them came out in 2016 and 2017 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/?f=architecture_Pascal
Hate to break it to ya, but 2020 was 5 years ago. More than half of these GPUs lifespan ago. Nvidia is a for profit company, not your friend. You can’t expect them to support every single product they’ve ever released forever. And they’re still doing better than AMD in that regard.
You can’t expect them to support every single product they’ve ever released forever. And they’re still doing better than AMD in that regard.
If nvidia had the pre-GSP cards’ drivers opensourced at least there would be a chance of maintaining support. But nvidia pulled the plug.
Intel’s and AMD’s drivers in the Mesa project will continue to receive support.
For example, just this week: Phoronix: Linux 6.19’s Significant ~30% Performance Boost For Old AMD Radeon GPUs These are GCN1 GPUs from 13yrs ago.
thanks to work by Valve
AMD did nothing to make their drivers better, Vale did.
Making them open to contributions was the first step, but ok I won’t engage in this petty tribalism.
The topic was about nvidia’s closed source drives.
Valve couldn’t do the same for pascal GPUs. Nobody but nvidia has the reclocking firmware, so even the reverse engineered nouveau NVK drivers are stuck at boot clock speeds.
That’s why I don’t like closed source proprietary. They decide to stop the support.
Gnawh Penisburg. I’m still sporting a laptop with a 1070 from about a decade ago…
I haven’t noticed as I have zero NVidia GPUs among my computers and servers.
