Comment by wewewedxfgdf
1 day ago
Perhaps not but one of the great things about Nvidia is their latest drivers often support very old cards.
1 day ago
Perhaps not but one of the great things about Nvidia is their latest drivers often support very old cards.
They're in the process of ending support for everything below the RTX 2000 series -
https://windowsforum.com/news/nvidia-ends-feature-support-fo...
I mean the GTX 1080 is over a decade old.
Compare it to some other products from that time:
- AMD FX Piledriver CPUs
- Skylake i7-6700K
- iPhone 6s
- Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
- Oculus Rift CV1
- Android 6 Marshmallow
I wish we did better when it came to software support. Hardware can last a long time if some effort is made on the software side. The 6700k isn't supported by Windows 11, but not for any good reasons. It's still got the performance to do quite a lot.
Bulldozer (and thus Piledriver) was stillborn unless you were a diehard AMD fan or an overclocker, so I don't think it's helpful to lump in here.
I'd still use an iPhone SE (released the same year as the 6s) if the battery could be easily replaced and iOS still supported it. I don't do anything on my phone that needs significant performance anyway.
I still keep my 2012 Macbook Pro around as a backup machine if something happens to my main machines, and every time I drag it out to check up on it, it still works great. It stopped getting any significant MacOS updates in 2022, but Linux still gets updates.
The GTX 1080 (Ti) still works for the vast majority of games in 1080p. The only thing that would really make it obsolete is driver issues.
I've been having issues with kernel updates because Nvidia dropped support for my GPUs. Apparently 9 years was the threshold for their "very old card" support because Pascal is now over.
The community can't fix it because their drivers are proprietary blobs. Open source drivers are essentially useless. I'll have to stick to something like Ubuntu to keep the hardware working without fighting DKMS every update.
This is the reason my next GPU will be either AMD or Intel.
Nvidia's latest drivers don't support GTX 1000 and older GPUs. They are barely 10 years old and are still plenty fast for a lot of software.
Maybe there’s a prestige angle to somewhat shame them into keeping up with nvidia. Though my sense is that they’re barely peers anymore in this space. :(
Perhaps René, the maintainer of T/2 Linux, will end up vibe coding an NVIDIA driver one of these days. He’s been reverse engineering and vibe coding a bunch of drivers for old graphics lately and live streaming everything.