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from the 32-bit-should-be-enough-for-anyone dept.
This week, NVIDIA has announced that they are ending mainstream graphics driver support for Fermi-based GeForce GPUs. Effective as of this month (i.e. immediately), all Fermi products are being moved to legacy support status, meaning they will no longer receive Game Ready driver enhancements, performance optimizations, and bugfixes. Instead, they will only receive critical bugfixes through the end of the legacy support phase in January 2019.
While the announcement mentions 'Fermi series GeForce GPUs,' the actual support plan specifies that mainstream driver support is limited to Kepler, Maxwell, and Pascal GPUs. So presumably all Fermi products are affected.
In the same vein, also effective this month is NVIDIA dropping mainstream driver support for 32-bit operating systems, as announced in December 2017. Like Fermi, 32-bit operating systems will still receive critical security updates through January 2019. This update also encompasses GeForce Experience, which will no longer receive software updates for Windows 32-bit operating systems.
Previously:
Nvidia to Stop Writing Drivers for 32-Bit Systems (Eventually)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 09 2018, @01:32PM (4 children)
A month ago
To add insult to injury, the nvid card won't work at all with nouveau... I guess it's HAMMERTIME!
(Score: 2, Informative) by higuita on Monday April 09 2018, @02:17PM (2 children)
This is always a problem with closed source drivers...buy a amd card next time, they are now using open source drivers that do work and they life is way bigger
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 09 2018, @02:54PM (1 child)
The "open source" driver for all modern AMD cards depends on proprietary software -- most functions do not work at all without it.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 10 2018, @07:49AM
Are you talking about firmware? Because then it's no different than the microcode in your CPU, or any other hardware for that matter.
The thing is, the firmware only depends on the hardware, where as the driver works with a specific OS-version. A company no longer making new firmware for a product only means no more bug fixes, things that used to work won't suddenly stop working. Where as when they stop updating drivers for new OS versions, the next OS update can render the hardware unusable.
That's why lots of people had to buy new hardware when Windows 10 was released - no Windows 10 compatible drivers - or install Linux, because open source drivers means that hardware support won't be discontinued over night.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 09 2018, @02:34PM
I got a couple of 'junk' Tesla cards (GT218) and tested them recently with Mesa 18.x Other than the cards themselves running hot, they seem to work fine with most OpenGL apps that the R600 driver works with, but have none of the Computer support.
So at least as far as linux is concerned nouveau is usable on GT, GK, and probably GF (I didn't have a card to test.) up to OpenGL 3.3 or 4.x depending on the card, but if you need CUDA or OCL GPGPU support, you are screwed if the official Nvidia drivers have dropped support.
Given that even on AMD hardware the Mesa drivers only support OpenCL 1.1 ATM you can't run either Virtual Currency Mining, or the majority of OpenCL based applications with the Open Source drivers STILL, I am not sure what the future holds. Given the push to Vulkan we may just see all this OGL/OCL support thrown to the wayside, because Vulkan is easier to maintain and all that hardware is obsolete, so why bother anyway.
I am not looking forward to having to upgrade to Vulkan hardware given how both the Nvidia and AMD GPUs have become locked down since Vega and Maxwell V2...