For newer GPUs from the Turing, Ampere, Ada Lovelace, or Hopper architectures, NVIDIA recommends switching to the open-source GPU kernel modules.
So 20-series onwards.
this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2024
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My ol' 1070 doesn't make the cut hey... ;-;
Maybe it's just because I'm older and more jaded, but that really feels like the last truly good era for GPUs.
Those 10 series cards had a ton of staying power, and the 480/580 were such damn good value cards.
It's more that back then was a better time for price to performance value. The 3000 and 4000 series cards were basically linear upgrades in terms of price to performance.
It's an indicator that there haven't been major innovations in the GPU space, besides perhaps the addition of the AI and Raytracing stuff, if you want to count those as upgrades.
It feels like the crypto mining goldrush really changed the way GPU manufacturers view the market.
I feel like AI has changed the game. Why sell retail when people are paying you billions to run LLMs in the cloud.
RTX 3050 (which got a new 6 gb version less than a year ago) is similar to 1070 Ti in terms of performance and 1080s are of course even better. Definitely a ton of staying power, even in 2024.
I bought a secondhand 1080 a couple years ago when the crypto bubble burst finally and it's still serving my needs just fine. It could play Baldur's Gate 3 just fine on release last year, which was the last "new" game I played on it. Seems like it'll still be good for a few years to come so yeah.
That was mostly because the 20 series was so bad. Expensive, didn't perform lightyears better to justify the price, raytracing wasn't used in any games (until recently).
The 30 series was supposed to be more of a return to form, then covid + mining ruined things.
I got a 2060 super and i must say i'm very happy, i do 3d stuff so the ray tracing was plenty useful and despite it getting a bit it fairs pretty great in most games and the price was okay at the time (500 €still a bit high since it was during the bitcoin mining madness =-=")
Still have a beautifully running 1070. 👌
Comrade. (☞ ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)☞
I think it works but the performance might not be ideal. Keep on the proprietary module.
And 16xx
Yep! My pre-built 1660 super i got years ago is still chugging along amazingly as a streaming device for my steam deck.
Yes. Everything older is unsupported in terms of the new Linux stuff anymore. Planned obsolescence yk?
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.
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Well their proprietary driver works fine for older hardware.
Does this mean upcoming distros can have the drivers inbuilt? NVIDIA Cards working out of the box? I'm Out of the Loop.
This has never been an issue. Nothing stops any distro from installing the DKMS drivers at install time. You also have the nouveau driver that can be installed by default if you don't want to ask users to agree to Nvidia's license for proprietary driver use.
You also have the nouveau driver that can be installed by default...
And pretty soon, NVK!
NVK is already usable, performancr isn't 100% of the proprietary driver but I play Overwatch on NVK at 165FPS on my RTX3070 laptop a lot, low settings but very playable. This is with an Optimus configuration (VRR Freesync panel on AMD iGPU) in GNOME Wayland.
oh wow, I have a 3080 TI desktop GPU, I should try it with Overwatch 2 + NVK.
Also: Thanks for OpenRGB. I love it.
Wasn't nova the new driver?
Never heard of that one. NVK is a brand new open source driver that uses features of the RTX series to reverse engineer Nvidia drivers. According to the project team, those features make it much easier than before, but it limits the scope to RTX series cards and onward.
This is a good discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/1cqcnr3/whats_the_difference_between_nvidia_open_source/
Essentially, Nova is a kernel level driver and not user level
But apparently people always had issues with NVidia graphics cards on Linux, no matter what driver it is. And the fact that even Mint and Ubuntu don't install the drivers by default tells that there indeed are some legal issues with it.
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Well, what I really wonder is if because the kernel can include it, if this will make an install more agnostic. Like literally pull my disk out of a gaming nvidia machine, and plug it into my AMD machine with full working graphics. If so this is good for me since I use a usb-c nvme ssd for my os to boot from on my work and home machines and laptops for when I'm not worrying. All three currently have nvidia cards and this works ok. I have some games to chill and take a break. My works core OS for work MDM etc unmodified. I like it that way.
I realise this is not a terribly useful case, but I could see it for graphically optimised VM migrations too not that I have many. Less work in transitioning gives greater flexibility.
this works ok
People said that the new 555 Nvidia drivers works good.
Like literally pull my disk out of a gaming nvidia machine, and plug it into my AMD machine with full working graphics.
This should work already, i switched from nvidia to amd this year by swapping the cards and removing the nvidia drivers some time later.
I guess it's because the drivers only apply to their specific hardware, so no problems having amd and nvidia drivers present at the same time.
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nvidia transitions fully? that's all i need to hear, good job nvidia 🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️
I stand with AMD
Forgive the stupid question, but what does this mean, exactly? Does it mean Nvidia support on par with that for AMD? Will this enable a release of Bazzite that supports Steam Gaming Mode for Nvidia cards?
It means it will break less on kernel updates. I don’t think it fundamentally changes much else for gaming.
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Nvidia, fix power management on open drivers. Then we are talking.
Cries in 1080 ti
Linux using proprietary drivers always feels like a plane using a transmission to me.
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