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AMD Ceases Graphics Driver Development for 32-bit Operating Systems
With the recent October releases of Adrenalin Edition, AMD has finally discontinued support for 32-bit operating systems. The latest 32-bit packages can still be manually downloaded through older driver release notes, of which Adrenalin Edition 18.9.3 is the last release with 32-bit drivers.
The change doesn't come as a surprise. Earlier this year, NVIDIA ceased driver development for 32-bit OSes, and early last year AMD dropped graphics driver support for 32-bit Windows 8.1. Pre-GCN hardware was moved to legacy status back in 2015. Ultimately, the idea is to concentrate development and engineering resources, particularly if those resources are limited. Over the past few years, AMD has put in a renewed effort in graphics driver development, retiring Catalyst for "Radeon Software" and embarking on major annual updates, both for gaming and professional products. In that sense, prolonging 32-bit support diffuses focus for very specific edge cases for little benefit, and that goes for both NVIDIA and AMD.
Previously: Nvidia to Stop Writing Drivers for 32-Bit Systems (Eventually)
Nvidia Ends Mainstream Support for Fermi GPUs and 32-Bit Operating Systems
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday October 30 2018, @08:49AM (4 children)
Latest x86 is 390.87 legacy (2018.8.27) while the latest x86_64 is 410.57 stable (2018.10.25): https://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html [nvidia.com]
Pretty sure all the 32bit proprietary games and CAD software require the 32bit drivers so they won't be supported on new nVidia graphics cards now. That includes wine of course...
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 31 2018, @01:14AM (1 child)
They certainly do not require 32-bit drivers. 32-bit libraries probably, but that is handled elsewhere and there are entire distros now that drop x86 support.
For example Arch has https://www.archlinux.org/packages/multilib/x86_64/lib32-nvidia-utils/ [archlinux.org] which provides 32-bit libraries to legacy applications on amd64 distribution in the latest version 410.x.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 31 2018, @03:27AM
OP (probably?) referring to the issues you can google with "wine nvidia 396 32bit". It seems some install scripts (binary blobs so not exactly scripts) were definitely broken as well as wine in some distros. Some of it got fixed. Some old stuff will never be fixed. Since most distros skip the short lived branches (beta) and most users avoid the unstable distros, it will take over a year before everyone switches over and notices the issues.
e.g. early in the release cycle Steam was being "smart" and trying to install "missing" packages under debian/ubuntu using the wrong package names. In Mint this might still be an issue.
Already people are installing the old driver, deploying their proprietary crap, and then upgrading the driver thus avoiding the issue. In newer hardware this won't be an option so it will come biting users in the ass later on.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 01 2018, @12:47AM (1 child)
Only the kernel module is limited to amd64. The amd64 driver contains both ia32 and amd64 OpenGL libraries.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday November 01 2018, @09:24AM
While saying "all" was wrong, as the other reply to the other reply mentioned, it's buggy in the real world and will take months for distros users to test out and some stuff will never work unless someone actively hacks the install blobs and removes false dependencies and the likes.
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