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’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.
Even now, CUDA is gold standard for data science / ML / AI related research and development. AMD is slowly brining around their ROCm platform, and Vulcan is gaining steam in that area. I’d love to ditch my nvidia cards and go exclusively AMD but nvidia supporting CUDA on consumer cards was a seriously smart move that AMD needs to catch up with.
Sorry for prying for details, but why exactly do you need NVIDIA?
CUDA is an Nvidia technology and they’ve gone out of their way to make it difficult for a competitor to come up with a compatible implementation. With cross-vendor alternatives like OpenCL and compute shaders, they’ve not put resources into achieving performance parity, so if you write something in both CUDA and OpenCL, and run them both on an Nvidia card, the CUDA-based implementation will go way faster. Most projects prioritise the need to go fast above the need to work on hardware from more than one vendor. Fifteen years ago, an OpenCL-based compute application would run faster on an AMD card than a CUDA-based one would run on an Nvidia card, even if the Nvidia card was a chunk faster in gaming, so it’s not that CUDA’s inherently loads faster. That didn’t give AMD a huge advantage in market share as not very much was going on that cared significantly about GPU compute.
Also, Nvidia have put a lot of resources over the last fifteen years into adding CUDA support to other people’s projects, so when things did start springing up that needed GPU compute, a lot of them already worked on Nvidia cards.
Same. Refuse to use NVIDIA going forward for anything.
Yeah, I stopped using Nvidia like 20 years ago. I think my last Nvidia card may have been a GeForce MX, then I switched to a Matrox card for a time before landing on ATI/AMD.
Back then AMD was only just starting their open source driver efforts so the “good” driver was still proprietary, but I stuck with them to support their efforts with my wallet. I’m glad I did because it’s been well over a decade since I had any GPU issues, and I no longer stress about whether the hardware I buy is going to work or not (so long as the Kernel is up to date).
I had an old NVidia gtx 970 on my previous machine when I switched to Linux and it was the source of 95% of my problems.
It died earlier this year so I finally upgraded to a new machine and put an Intel Arc B580 in it as a stop gap in hopes that video cards prices would regain some sanity eventually in a year or two. No problems whatsoever with it since then.
Now that AI is about to ruin the GPU market again I decided to bite the bullet and get myself an AMD RX 9070 XT before the prices go through the roof. I ain’t touching NVidia’s cards with a 10 foot pole. I might be able to sell my B580 for the same price I originally bought it for in a few months.
Sadly GPU passthrough only worked on Nvidia cards when I was setting up my server, so I had to get one of them :(
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.
Pascal is coming up on 10 years old. You can’t expect companies to support things forever.
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.
If they’re going to release things under a proprietary license and send lawyers after individuals just trying to get their hardware to work, then yes, yes I can.
Don’t want to support it anymore? Fine. Open source it and let the community take over.
Make them open source the drivers so the community can do it then.
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 😂
Nvidia was awful before the LLM craze, now they’re awful AND evil.
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
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. 🤷♂️
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.
TIL Arch is a footgun. 🤡 cope. 😉
But yeah, I agree, if package maintainers were astute there, a warning would’ve probably been good somehow. Not sure pacman supports pre-install warnings. Maybe? It does support warning about installing a renamed/moved package. But the naming would’ve had to be really weird for everyone involved if the warning would be clear in that case.
Windows doesnt drop to CLI and break if the graphics driver is missing. But also GPU driver updates are not forced on you just by updating the system.
Windows doesnt drop to CLI and break if the graphics driver is missing.
Okay. Kind of a matter of definition of “breaking” but sure.
But also GPU driver updates are not forced on you just by updating the system.
Right. But on Linux they happen automatically when upgrading the rest of your system, is what I was saying.
Windows doesn’t force update your driver and remove support though, and even if it did it won’t drop you to some CLI, it will still work.
Rolling distros also only update when you tell them. It is the user who is pulling the trigger on the footgun in both cases.
I’d say the main difference is that arch users are more trigger-happy about being up to date.
Also, I think pacman should at least warn you if the problem is enough to warrant a post on the arch website.
Sorta, but you run one command to update everything at once, and even though the system knows what GPU you have it still seems to update the driver to one thats not compatible, instead of holding that update back.
Also if it didn’t warn the user when updating, the user had no idea they were pulling any trigger, especially when Linux falls back to CLI after this instead of just falling back to a basic driver.
What you described is what happaned with arch. The transitioning shouldn’t have happened this way, IMO.
Other distros usually don’t send their users to TTY after an update if they can help it.
On the long term, the situation is the same on linux and windows: you choose the latest driver and live with that given feature set and its bugs.
I think pacman should at least warn you if the problem is enough to warrant a post on the arch website.
It will, if you install the informant package from the aur or the chaotic-aur unofficial repo.
Otherwise you can follow the advice in the wiki System maintenance page, which says to read the home page, or news RSS feed, or arch-announce mailing list before upgrading.
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.
this bubble will pop sooner or later, 2nd hand market about to get flooded
I can’t believe they would do this to poor Borland. I guess I’ll just need to use an AMD GPU for my Turbo Pascal fun.
My son was going to switch to Linux this week. He has a GTX 1060.
Nouveau might be good enough by now for most games that will run on a 1060, maybe worth a try.
AFAIK they still don’t support reclocking on anything older than Turing, meaning the GPU is stuck at the lowest clock frequency and therefore runs very slowly.
He just needs to stay on the 580 driver. Bazzite is handling that transparently and wont update you to the 590 driver if you have an unsupported GPU.
Then next time round, buy an AMD or Intel GPU. They tend tp treat their customers better.
Nice, maybe bazzite it is then.
I guess he can’t say he uses arch btw
He wants to use Mint. This is what is called planned obsolescence. I say what Linus Torvalds says.
Might be able to use Mint Debian Edition.
It’s not that bad as I understand it. If you are using arch with a Pascal GPU you can switch to the legacy proprietary branch. https://archlinux.org/news/nvidia-590-driver-drops-pascal-support-main-packages-switch-to-open-kernel-modules/
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fuck. I just realised I have a pascal NVIDIA card on my laptop.
I’m running debian 13, wtf do I do?
EDIT : seems ok?
It was expected that the Linux Driver support will end with the GPU driver branch 580 as well, but NVIDIA extended this to branch 590 (it jumped straight from branch 580 to 590 and a single v580 Linux GPU driver exists). So, if you are boasting any of these GPUs, you won’t be getting Game Ready drivers that offer day-one game support and optimizations for the upcoming titles. However, there should be no issue in using them for how long you wish. Still, users should keep an eye on the quarterly updates as these are essential.
Nothing. You run Debian. It’ll keep working at least until Debian 14. Possibly even after.
😎🤓
Take that, bleeding edge. 🤪
580 is LTS tho, you’ll get security patches for a few years at least
edit: where are my manners? here’s the source
https://docs.nvidia.com/datacenter/tesla/drivers/supported-drivers-and-cuda-toolkit-versions.html
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.
I really dodged a bullet upgrading from my 1070Ti to the last AMD (9070XT or I misremembered?) for the black Friday. Lowest price of the generation just before RAM’s price skyrocketed.
My SO is not so lucky…
Maybe we should use this card for under TV computers with Windows… sadly?
Pascal… Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time… A long time
The 1060 is still hanging around ~2% usage on steam hardware survey, so it’s not completely irrelevant yet.
Just make 580 legacy. Problem solved. :) (It’s already LTS though)
By the way, I have GTX 1080 and this seems to be end of the way. What is the similar AMD I can get, preferably second hand?
That newer open source driver is still far behind but is progressing. Those graphics cards will have a great new life with modern kernels someday
I’m running PopOS and Debian with Nvidia cards that should be affected by this, if I’m understanding this right. Ugh.
What a pain.
Nah, you’re in pop and Debian, you’ll be fine for a while.
