nvidia hardware support

[mastablasta]

i am currently on 18.04 and i have a very old PC. single core Athlon with 4 GB ram and nvidia GT 730. it has a drive with windows XP in it, but i haven't booted to it for a very long time. Kubuntu works well, but PC is starting to show it's age. at time it would slow down, and some sites that have more scripts (gmail) sometimes take long time to open and are slow. also some wine games are having some difficulties.

i was planning an upgrade or replacement. so i was thinking since i have relatively new HDD and PSU and GPU cards are way too expensive, i could replace the motherboard in this old box (found version II of Asus board i used in my kid's PC), add new ram and new CPU (old model - Ryzen 5 3600).

but i wonder if this Fermi GPU would be supported in 20.04. they plan to support it until end of 2022 and it uses legacy drivers 3.90. nvidia website is strange because drivers 4.60 (https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driv...x/171392/en-us) show to be supporting GT 730 and at the same time it is on phased out list. they GPU card has VGA output, so i can continue use my old LG monitor which works just fine.

so far i am happy with current setup as everything works, so upgrading it is making me nervous.

anyway, i think it's probably legacy driver and my plan is to stay on 20.04 LTS (with 5.4 kernel) for as long as possible and later exchange/upgrade the card when prices get a bit more normal. if 22.04 LTS will be supported with nvidia i will stay on that. card is more or less capable for old games i play, just the CPU has occasional issues i believe. the card may still support the kernel, but xserver and other things are another matter. a user on ubuntu forums had issues with older model nvidia 610 GPU and nvidia proprietary drivers on 20.04.

what other things should i consider? the new motherboard will probably mean i need to reinstall current OS (installed in MBR), so this means i might as well think about getting an SSD and then moving current old setup slowly to new install & splitting data a bit more (maybe do some symlinks and such).

[jglen490]

For my last desktop unit (still sitting in the closet!), I had a an old Nvidia GT730 and some fairly new other hardware (9th Gen i5, MSI MB, and a couple of SSDs). The NVidia worked well with the 390 driver. I initially installed 20.04 with the Nouveau driver, and then updated to the Nvidia driver using the Driver Manager under System Settings.

The GT730 is not a great graphics card, but it did work well enough.

[petrux]

Thank you, jglen490

New to Kubuntu, after 20+ years of SuSE, and did not know about the Driver Manager - duh!

I had broken the 460 Nvidia driver - a module disappeared after an apt-get autoremove (?). Had not figured out how to reinstall the driver (running in Recovery Mode on one monitor with Intel graphics) but looking through the Driver Manager, I must have triggered an update, because suddenly an updated 460 Nvidia driver suite showed up in Discover – good fortune. Installed, rebooted, and all is good again.

(Gigabyte GC-WB300D MB, Intel i7-4770, 32GB, Nvidia GTX770)

[mastablasta]

kernel updates sometimes and driver doesn't follow. it can happen and leave you with nouveau. but reinstalling the driver will help in this case. we had this happen on my kids PC. he has GTX 1650 which he got just before the covid at a much discounted price.

so 770 can use new driver, but 730 cant t. interesting.

Well GT730 is more than enough for old games (GTA:SA, Oblivion, Civ4, Far Cry, Cod4, CoD:MW, Hearts of iron 3, Europa Universalis 3, Doom3, CS:GO, HL2, ...) and its' performance is similar to some current APUs. i just want to milk it a bit more. currently the only thing you can get here is newer version (the GT1030) at high price (130 EUR+) or one of those super expensive RTX. there are no AMD cards on offer at all and other nvidia chips (e.g. the GTX1650) also disappeared. and i am thinking Ryzen 5 or Core i5 should serve me for another 10 years. current PC started it's life in 2004 and had received some upgrades, but they were limited. i planned to upgrade to a phenom before, but never got around to do it..

So anyway i am close to a real plan here. now just need to decide to really do it and take some time off, because i am sure something will go wrong and i will have to troubleshoot. these things are never easy on the mind.

[petrux]

Yes, no issues with the 460 driver on the GTX770. It was picked up at the time of the initial system installation.

Good to know about drivers maybe not following a kernel update. I will use autoremove more judiciously!

[vanadiumboy]

I just recently did an update to Kubuntu 20.04.2 LTS.
It has a Athlon II X2 2.8 GHz. CPUs are never a problem.
It seems as if it is always the graphics card or sound card the problem because of drivers.


This machine has a Geforce 8600.
After the update, it would not boot up. The 340 driver wasn’t working anymore. I had to look on the web for how to fix it but I think the driver 340 is dead or someone did not properly test something in the kernel.


I switched on the Nouveau driver, like mastablasta said and that works.


I wonder for how long the GTX 650 and GTX 750 and such have.
Get ready to buy an RTX 3080.

[notabug]

Interesting thread. I have an Nvidia GT745 in my 12 year old HP computer. I salvaged the 745 from a broken computer to replace a GT520 card. The GT745 seems to run fine on the 460 driver. Thanks.
(Kubuntu 21.10)

[GreyGeek]

My 20.04 Installation on my 10 yr old Acer Aspire V3-771G laptop ran the same update yesterday and the my Nvidia GT650M continued to work properly with the 390.144 Nvidia driver.

I hope my Acer continues to work well with the updates because I certainly don't have the funds to buy a more recent or new laptop. I'm planning on doing a fresh install of the 23.04 LTS release. I hope it continues to work will with this laptop.

[jglen490]

Got my new HP laptop this past Christmas. Not a gamer, so no need here for a graphics powerhouse. The rest will last a long time. My desktop unit is in the closet and has decent specs, and that's one that has a GT730. It is a very good graphics card and works well with the Nvidia 390 series. I had tried a 4xx-something driver, but while Nvidia says it works, the 390 was actually much more stable in the desktop's 20.04 LTS. More current is not always better. Over time, it's actually harder/more complex to support much older hardware with much newer drivers.

[GreyGeek]

Ya, older computers fall out of the "Window of Compatibility" created by the devs dropping old drivers to make room for new drivers in an ISO file that is limited to 4.7GB or less.