this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2024
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It's not really planned obsolescence, they changed the way their drivers work with the 16xx/20xx series. Up till the 10xx series, they did a lot of algorithms and processing in the software. Then they switched to doing most of that on the GPU in the form of firmware. The 10 series GPUs can't do that.
Like most hardware vendors, Nvidia doesn't want (and probably isn't allowed to) publish all of their special sauce source code. They can open source the driver and load a binary blob like, most hardware does, but only on the newer cards.
The older cards will have to keep the special sauce in software on the CPU, so those devices will need to stick to the proprietary driver.
I doubt very much it's about whether they are allowed too or not. They're the ones at the top of the hardware supply chain, designing their own chips and having them fabricated. It's them telling other companies, like Gigabyte and EVGA, what they are allowed or not allowed to do.
Nvidia also buys and licenses code from other companies. These days they're on top of the chain, but they used to be a lot smaller. Maybe they rewrote their drivers to remove the external code, but I wouldn't be surprised if they still have old external code in their drivers.
AMD tried to open their source code for a display technique (VRR I think? Not sure what it was) but was prevented from doing so by the standards authority, presumably because they used licensed reference code. I don't think this applies to the older 10xx series of cards, but these factors are difficult to work around.
Hmdi 2.1 and the hdmi consortium prevented them from releasing code. It wasn't even proprietary, just based on a licensed implementation from what I understood.