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NVIDIA to Drop Support for Old Video Cards from Linux Drivers

The company is committed to maintaining support for some old GPUs until 2017

Mar 13, 2014 15:02 GMT  ·  By
NVIDIA will still provide some support with one Legacy driver until 2017
   NVIDIA will still provide some support with one Legacy driver until 2017

NVIDIA has been a very friendly company towards its Linux user base and the developers have been publishing Linux drivers updates on a constant basis, but they had to stop somewhere with the support for old video cards.

NVIDIA has just announced that they will not provide support any longer for a host of video cards after the release of the 340 Linux driver. As it stands right now, NVIDIA publishes quite a few branches, and every one of them is designed to fill a particular niche.

The Long Lived Branch is now at version 331.49, and this can be called the LTS branch. It's updated rarely, but when they do update it, NVIDIA doesn't hold back. It's stable and the driver can be used without any major problems.

The Short Lived Branch is now at version 334.21 and this is what you might call the Beta release. NVIDIA publishes a lot of these, and most of the changes from this branch usually land in the stable one, if it doesn't affect the stability or if it has other issues.

The next four branches are called the Legacy GPU versions and cover the 304.xx, 71.86.xx, 96.43.xx, and 173.14.xx series. These branches are rarely updated and their sole purpose is to make old video cards work on new systems. These do not get performance improvements, only the occasional X and Linux kernel support.

“After Release 340, any subsequent driver release starting with Release 343 will cease to support the products listed in this section. The Release 340 drivers will continue to support these products until April 1, 2016, and the NVIDIA support team will continue to address driver issues for these products in driver branches up to and including Release 340. However, future driver enhancements and optimizations in driver releases after Release 340 will not support these products,” noted NVIDIA in a formal announcement.

The company also posted a comprehensive list of chipsets that will no longer be supported by their drivers. You should check this list to see if you need to make some hardware upgrades.

There is some good news among this entire house cleaning. The Linux 304.* legacy driver will be kept alive by the company and it's the last to provide support for NV4x and G7x GPUs (new Linux kernels, X server updates, bug fixes).

The support included in the NVIDIA 304.* legacy series will cease at the end of 2017.