What's the future for those of us with old nvidia cards wrt Wayland?

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The last official nvidia driver my graphics card support is version 470, which does not—and will never have—wayland support. Nouveau does have wayland support, with decent performance even, but unfortunately nouveau is not stable enough to be used in a daily basis for me, crashing once every 5-6 hours or so. Also, as I’ve been told elsewhere, nouveau is almost abandonware, not seeing any significant updates in over a year (please correct me if I’m wrong on this), so problems like these aren’t fixed in a timely manner.

Fortunately, as of right now, this isn’t really a problem for me, since the 470 driver works with no issues, but I keep wondering: am I, and anyone else that has an older nvidia graphics card, stuck forever in an older graphics stack? Right now, running X11 is fine, but 5-10 years from now, development will probably be mostly shifted to wayland and most X11 projects will be in full maintenance mode. Will I remain unable to run Wayland reliably on my PC in 2028? Will nouveau pick up its pace? Will nvidia, in an unlikely strike of goodwill, add wayland support to old drivers (unlikely)?

What do you think?

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@romariorios Unlikely to add any support… This a desktop or a laptop? If a desktop, keep an eye out for Turing cards, they will run the open nvidia driver…

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Are serious LInux users realistically thinking our currently outdated hardware will/should work with the newest bell and whistle code for another 5-10 years?

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@argentwolf that all depends on the hardware :wink: I have Aeon running on a 17 year old MacBook… it runs fine, slow to start some applications since it’s only a dual core with 4GB of ram, but it works…

For graphics, AMD support seems short lived for some products, Intel, just seems to rock along, for Nvidia, Quadro cards have good support 10 years. I have a Quadro K620 it’s support is out to the end of 2026, it runs the latest 560 series driver you can get those for ~US$20 on ebay…

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@malcolmlewis are you running Wayland on your old MacBook and do you honestly have an expectation that you should be able to?

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@argentwolf heck no, I’m surprised it worked!!! I expect my current desktop hardware should be good for another few years, if not longer…

System:
  Kernel: 6.10.2-1-default arch: x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc v: 13.3.0
    clocksource: hpet avail: acpi_pm
    parameters: initrd=\opensuse-aeon\6.10.2-1-default\initrd-dfa17851bb0dbc13f94f2e28f1e3285e915f9041
    quiet loglevel=2 systemd.show_status=no console=ttyS0,115200 console=tty0
    vt.global_cursor_default=0 ignition.platform.id=metal security=selinux
    selinux=1 root=UUID=<filter> rootflags=subvol=@/.snapshots/9/snapshot
    systemd.machine_id=<filter>
  Desktop: GNOME v: 46.3.1 tk: GTK v: 3.24.43 wm: gnome-shell
    tools: gsd-screensaver-proxy dm: GDM v: 46.2 Distro: openSUSE Aeon
Graphics:
  Device-1: Intel Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics vendor: Apple
    driver: i915 v: kernel arch: Gen-4 process: Intel 65n built: 2006-07 ports:
    active: LVDS-1 empty: DVI-D-1,SVIDEO-1,VGA-1 bus-ID: 00:02.0
    chip-ID: 8086:2a02 class-ID: 0300
  Device-2: Micron Built-in iSight driver: uvcvideo type: USB rev: 2.0
    speed: 480 Mb/s lanes: 1 mode: 2.0 bus-ID: 2-4:5 chip-ID: 05ac:8501
    class-ID: 0e02
  Display: wayland server: X.org v: 1.21.1.12 with: Xwayland v: 24.1.1
    compositor: gnome-shell driver: gpu: i915 display-ID: 0
  Monitor-1: LVDS-1 model: Apple Color LCD built: 2006 res: 1280x800
    dpi: 114 gamma: 1.2 size: 286x179mm (11.26x7.05") diag: 337mm (13.3")
    ratio: 16:10 modes: 1280x800
  API: EGL v: 1.5 hw: drv: intel crocus platforms: device: 0 drv: crocus
    device: 1 drv: swrast gbm: drv: crocus surfaceless: drv: crocus wayland:
    drv: crocus x11: drv: crocus
  API: OpenGL v: 4.5 compat-v: 2.1 vendor: intel mesa v: 24.1.3 glx-v: 1.4
    direct-render: yes renderer: Mesa Intel 965GM (CL) device-ID: 8086:2a02
    memory: 375 MiB unified: yes display-ID: :0.0

Edit: add egl info

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They seem pretty expensive :frowning: (especially in Brazilian money, which is worth one fifth of a dollar (sometimes one tenth after taxes)). This is why I bought basically an old-stock nvidia card: it was the only one I could afford.

I mean, Linux is famous for reviving old hardware. I own a 10-year-old laptop that I’m expecting to fully support Wayland 5 years from now, so it’s not far fetched to want the same for my desktop.

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@romariorios Have a look on the likes of ebay for one of these then? Would suggest a P(ascal) series… should be good for a few more years?

Quadro Series:
Quadro GV100, Quadro GP100, Quadro P6000, Quadro P5200, Quadro P5000, Quadro P4000, Quadro P2200, Quadro P2000, Quadro P1000, Quadro P620, Quadro P600, Quadro P400, Quadro M6000 24GB, Quadro M6000, Quadro M5000, Quadro M4000, Quadro M2000, Quadro K2200, Quadro K1200, Quadro K620

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I apologize for replying to an old thread, but just in case you’re still interested, I do have several card recommendations for you:

-AMD: Easier option, since amdgpu ensures that even old GPUs are well supported. Cheaper options include anything from RX5xx. Except for RX520. Cheap, yes, but not recommended. Start from RX550 upwards instead.

-Nvdia: @malcolmlewis made a good point about ebay - they do have some good stuff. And especially since you’re in Brazil, you wouldn’t have to contend with the ungodly shipment delays that plague most of us here in Asia Pacific. However, I can’t recommend anything below Turing at this point, not even Pascal. Especially since, in some cases, some Turing cards can almost be as cheap as some Pascal ones. If you want, you can go the used Quadro route: T400, T1000, and the likes, depending on your needs. Otherwise, do remember that 1650s/1660s are also Turing-based, so they should be able to use the new open driver.

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@Truerror @romariorios You could also look at an Intel ARC A380 if wanting new? It’s what I run here as my primary GPU for three screens, and with oneapi installed have compute capabilities. As long as the X16 slot is PCIe slot is 3.0 x16, I don’t have rebar but performance is still ok…

|----------------.------------------------------------------------------------|
| Device ID      | 1                                                          |
| Device Name    | Intel(R) Arc(TM) A380 Graphics                             |
| Device Vendor  | Intel(R) Corporation                                       |
| Device Driver  | 24.13.029138 (Linux)                                       |
| OpenCL Version | OpenCL C 1.2                                               |
| Compute Units  | 128 at 2450 MHz (1024 cores, 5.018 TFLOPs/s)               |
| Memory, Cache  | 6087 MB, 4096 KB global / 64 KB local                      |
| Buffer Limits  | 2891 MB global, 2961202 KB constant                        |
|----------------'------------------------------------------------------------|
| Info: OpenCL C code successfully compiled.                                  |
| FP64  compute                                          not supported        |
| FP32  compute                                         3.178 TFLOPs/s (2/3 ) |
| FP16  compute                                         4.764 TFLOPs/s ( 1x ) |
| INT64 compute                                         0.360  TIOPs/s (1/16) |
| INT32 compute                                         1.429  TIOPs/s (1/4 ) |
| INT16 compute                                         8.483  TIOPs/s ( 2x ) |
| INT8  compute                                         3.108  TIOPs/s (2/3 ) |
| Memory Bandwidth ( coalesced read      )                         70.60 GB/s |
| Memory Bandwidth ( coalesced      write)                        108.31 GB/s |
| Memory Bandwidth (misaligned read      )                        125.23 GB/s |
| Memory Bandwidth (misaligned      write)                        120.42 GB/s |
| PCIe   Bandwidth (send                 )                          4.52 GB/s |
| PCIe   Bandwidth (   receive           )                          4.27 GB/s |
| PCIe   Bandwidth (        bidirectional)            (Gen3 x16)    4.64 GB/s |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------|
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@romariorios ,

IF you don’t play games, the nvidia 1030 is still worth a look. It is sooo cheap and obsolete that several manufacturers have revived it! 25 watts … supports CUDA, which means hardware h264 and h265 decoding with nvdec and/or nvdec-copy.

I have a 2 GB memory version. My only complaint is that it runs out of memory on the handful of VERY HIGH BIT RATE videos I have. When this happens, it falls to vdpau-copy, which actually works very well on my box. MSI recently released a 4 GB version. At less than $100, it is definitely worth a look.

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True. Intel’s cards are getting better day by day. And especially if you don’t plan to play graphically demanding, latest release games on max settings, they’re definitely viable options. Good call.

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Thank you all for the recommendations.

If I had to buy a video card right now, I’d probably go with either the nvidia gt 1030 or a radeon rx. But ebay has some very good nvidia quadro offers, so I’ll keep an eye on them. My only concern is import taxes, which might make these options a bit unattractive.

As for intel, unfortunately, from what I’m seeing on ebay, they’re way too expensive. Maybe they will become more affordable in the future, but I don’t see them as an option today.

But getting back to the original question, what if I wasn’t able to switch video cards? Would I have to stop using Plasma eventually? Would applications stop working? Should I expect my system to become broken because of the old video card?

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Not much will change. You will need to use the Nouveau driver when the Nvidia drivers no longer work with the kernel.

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I doubt that you will be stuck with the same old computer and old GPU in 5-10 years time. Time marches on and things become out-dated. It’s natural and normal for older hardware to not get support for the newest of stuff. I assume that you still have an old GPU in your computer because of your real life situation. I hope that will, hopefully, change for the better too, where buying a new computer isn’t as big of a jump.

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Sadly, many brand-new graphics cards are still being sold with old nvidia GPUs around these parts (GeForce GT 7xxx and the like, for instance). So this might become a problem in the near future, if X11 support turns poor. People will start wondering why the graphics cards they bought brand new just 2-3 years before are unsupported by GNOME 62.

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I’m frankly extremely confused by this. Are there any modern cards being sold today, that use an old architecture and they have a new name as is they’re new, shiny cards? To my knowledge, this only happens at the extreme low-end, where people just need a display output, not high end gaming and computational power, and even then, they use a modern architecture, with modern drivers. The example you gave is for a series of GPUs from a decade ago too.