Using old nvidia driver

johan.lindgren · n00b Joined: 17 Sep 2013 Posts: 15

Finally I started looking into my relatively small graphics problems, my latest upgrades have complained that my currently installed/upgraded nvidia-drivers package does not support my old quadro fx 580(?) from around 2009. It seems to have had support until 340.107-r1 and then no more...

Now I have started digging down the rabbit hole to try and recompile my system to make do with the old driver and still upgrade everything around, but this is where I start to wonder weather this will actually work or if I am only putting hours on something that is given not to work for any given reason.

For now I have re-installed the old driver and has just unmerged the newest installed version, masked everything from the old driver and onwards. But now I have complaints from nv-codec-headers and ffmpeg and so on which them selves have larger amounts of dependencies them selfes - so my question is - is this doable or should I give up and by a new card just to make everything happy?

eccerr0r · Posted: Thu Dec 05, 2019 12:25 am Post subject:

I ended up having to migrate to nouveau for old cards. I figure it was bound to happen and nvidia drops support of their binary driver, or at least drop the ball on continuing updates.
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Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

Ionen · Developer Joined: 06 Dec 2018 Posts: 2892

Shame that even on older cards, nouveau is often plagued with lacking power management support and you're left being constantly in low power mode. Albeit it's good enough if you're don't need intensive 3D usage and just want a working display without headaches.

That aside 340.107 should work (I haven't tried), the last release isn't "that" old (it's from 2018), and was given support for xorg 1.20. But should probably stop things from trying to use features from it, aka don't even specify VIDEO_CARDS=nvidia which is what cause ffmpeg to look for nv-codec-headers, alternatively could selectively use -video_cards_nvidia USE only when it's a problem (Edit: leaving it set globally might avoid other potential issues, haven't tracked down the implications).

molletts · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 16 Feb 2013 Posts: 131

I'm using 340.107-r1 with a GTX260 in my "no. 2" PC that I keep at my parents' house. I can't remember exactly what combination of USE flags I've got, except that I've set -video_cards_nvidia for ffmpeg. The vdpau use flag should still work without that to get accelerated video decoding & post-processing (I only use it for the awesome deinterlacer as the CPU is plenty powerful enough for decoding and gives better results than the hardware decoder).

Have a look at bug 693704 for patches to get nvidia-drivers-340.107 to compile with the latest kernels.

Ionen · Developer Joined: 06 Dec 2018 Posts: 2892

I kind of wonder why the ffmpeg ebuild enables ffnvcodec (nvenc/nvdec/cuvid) "because" you have a nvidia in VIDEO_CARDS, much like other codecs/features you may not want/need it, would probably make more sense to have a nvcodec USE flag and prevent this situation with legacy drivers at the same time.

johan.lindgren · n00b Joined: 17 Sep 2013 Posts: 15

Interesting, so it seems lots of cards lost its support from that driver and on.. For me it feels a pity to replace the card since I RARELY play games, and if I do I make do with Quake3 once in a while, but that seems always to work... currently on the nouveau driver
Seems harder to make the browser happy then... looking through google maps in street view is not so fun..

chrome://gpu/