Nvidia 580 series of drivers will be the last to support GPUs based on the Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta architectures.
Unix graphics feature deprecation schedule
They really want to kill off the 10x series
And with no real reason. The 1080 Ti in my machine runs better than a 4060 I tested some time ago (the only thing changed was the graphics card).
And with no real reason
The real reason is planned obsolescence. Your old GPU working is bad for NVidia because it means you're not buying a new one from them.
I know it's a generation later but the 1660ti I bought secondhand just before the pandemic is also working like a beast. If I had a lot of disposable income maybe I would've upgraded but it's performing so good that I'd rather spend the 1500+ bucks on a different project like a NAS for jellyfin.
Mine already died from old age. Gave me 9 years of use. I am not even mad that it died. lol
Of all the titles you could choose ...
The article is interesting in that it talks about pushing towards open versions of kernel modules, instead of legacy ones, and of much broader scope that the literal 2 lines you chose as title.
Why not keeping the original?
Because the open module is only for Turing or later GPUs, or Ada, and the open module is available for those since 2022 so it's not that big of a news.
That doesn't mean it's good they're deprecating cards to do it. They were still selling GT1030s new until relatively recently, and the GTX1080 is a perfectly workable card.
If you think open versions are cool, how about them just open-sourcing the Maxwell & Pascal drivers? Oh, that's right, they won't because the "special sauce" is in the driver, not the card BIOS like it is for the Turing & up families.
How is nouveau doing for those older cards these days? Are they at least still usable as a display adapter?
They're usable as adapters and for 2D stuff, but performance is significantly worse for 3D due to being stuck at the minimum clock speed
my 750 ti works. nouveau can't increase the clock speed to the operating clock on boot, on boot the display on that card shows random data with colorful pixels, and nvtop does not see it either, but it works.
Nouveau is dead, it's been replaced with Zink on NVK.
I think NVK is only for newer cards though, right?
NVK doesn't support older cards though last time I checked. Pretty funny how I ended up with a stack of paperweights because NVidia dropped support and Nouveau/NVK can't get their shit together and instead of focusing on existing hardware they rather keep chasing the "latest and greatest".
I was just thinking, I wish a trillion dollar company would figure out a way to turn a few billion dollars worth of usable hardware into e-waste today.
Hopefully people dumping these cards drives down the used prices.
Novideo
(Perhaps asking silly questions in order to understand, I've never totally understood the nvidia driver numbers and what they mean, i just kinda installed some and they seem to work and i just forgot about them, i can run the modest games i like)
So just for clarity the 580 drivers will support my 980Ti right? How long will those be supported for? Will there come a time that i will not be able to properly use this card with linux and run (modest games) games on it?
The 980Ti as stated by the Dirk's comment use Maxwell architecture, I'm not able to find any end of support date on the site, so I'm not sure when they will drop support.
Will there come a time that i will not be able to properly use this card with linux and run (modest games) games on it?
Unfortunately you don't need to wait to see this happens, because it's already happening right now, indeed dx12 games have a lot of problems running on this older cards on linux, and I myself experienced this with my 1060 first with cyberpunk 2077 and after that with resident evil 2 remastered.
As even stated by doitsujin (dxvk creator):
Low D3D12 performance on Nvidia Pascal (and older) GPUs is expected and likely won't improve much. The hardware has a bunch of limitations that make it very hard to extract good performance. Turing fares better, but only AMD actually runs reasonably well right now.
Source: https://github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton/issues/465#issuecomment-744092867
Ah thanks for the reply. That is a shame about DX12, i must have not tried any of these cos i've found all games i pick run great (i mostly play 2D non intensive indie games). I did play some Death Stranding and was very surprised by how well it ran!
I'll go for AMD if i can next time (i've been doing well getting hand me downs from friends who love getting the latest stuff for themselves!)
Poor Volta.
Most 10xx work perfectly fine, and were also still being sold till recently.
So many laptops have 1650s until 2021. And they were still available to buy as recent as last year.
Maxwell
Pascal
Volta
Additions from Comments
Phew, my 770 is not on the list
Kepler support was dropped a while ago
Why my MX250 isn't on the list, it's based on Pascal.
Copy&Pasted from somewhere.
Missing gtx 745, 830M, 840M, 850M and 860M, MX130, mx150, mx230, mx250
Updated, thanks.