Device support quietly reduced in 430 release series

Hi,

Comparing 430.xx to 418.74, looking at the list of devices supported as documented in the readme, I have noticed that the 430 series drops support for:

-10DE0FCD GeForce GT 755M
-10DE0FCE GeForce GT 640M LE
-10DE0FD1 GeForce GT 650M
-10DE0FD3 GeForce GT 640M LE
-10DE0FD4 GeForce GTX 660M
-10DE0FD5 GeForce GT 650M
-10DE0FD8 GeForce GT 640M
-10DE0FD9 GeForce GT 645M
-10DE0FDF GeForce GT 740M
-10DE0FE0 GeForce GTX 660M
-10DE0FE1 GeForce GT 730M
-10DE0FE2 GeForce GT 745M
-10DE0FE4 GeForce GT 750M
-10DE0FE9 GeForce GT 750M
-10DE0FEA GeForce GT 755M
-10DE0FEC GeForce 710A
-10DE0FED GeForce 820M
-10DE0FEE GeForce 810M
-10DE0FF6 Quadro K1100M
-10DE0FF8 Quadro K500M
-10DE0FFB Quadro K2000M
-10DE0FFC Quadro K1000M
-10DE1198 GeForce GTX 880M
-10DE119A GeForce GTX 860M
-10DE119D GeForce GTX 775M
-10DE119E GeForce GTX 780M
-10DE119F GeForce GTX 780M
-10DE11A0 GeForce GTX 680M
-10DE11A1 GeForce GTX 670MX
-10DE11A2 GeForce GTX 675MX
-10DE11A3 GeForce GTX 680MX
-10DE11A7 GeForce GTX 675MX
-10DE11B6 Quadro K3100M
-10DE11B7 Quadro K4100M
-10DE11B8 Quadro K5100M
-10DE11BC Quadro K5000M
-10DE11BD Quadro K4000M
-10DE11BE Quadro K3000M
-10DE11E0 GeForce GTX 770M
-10DE11E1 GeForce GTX 765M
-10DE11E2 GeForce GTX 765M
-10DE11FC Quadro K2100M
-10DE1291 GeForce GT 735M
-10DE1293 GeForce GT 730M
-10DE1296 GeForce 825M
-10DE1298 GeForce GT 720M
-10DE129A GeForce 910M
-10DE12B9 Quadro K610M
-10DE12BA Quadro K510M

I don’t see any mention of this reduced device support in the changelog, nor at https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/533434/linux/current-graphics-driver-releases/

It would be unfortunate for so much device support to be dropped. Is this an accidental change?

I suspect someone hit the key. Otherwise I must be hallucinating because 430.26 works fine on my “unsupported” GT740M which is also gone from the list.

Thanks for checking. What’s the PCI ID of your device?

ProdID 1292, there are only some Lenovo specific desktop 740A left, the generic 740M is gone. Furthermore 1291-1293 all use the same GK208M chip so the changes don’t make any sense at all.

Makes for an interesting speculation, though. Maybe this is the advent of a new legacy driver, retiring Kepler. Looking at the support timeframes, there have always been two legacy releases and the support for the 340 driver ends by 12/19.
[url]Support timeframes for Unix legacy GPU releases | NVIDIA

173: 08->02.14 G5X
304: 12->12.17 G7X
340: 07.14->12.19 G8x/G9x
390: 01.18->12.22 Fermi
???: 20->24 Kepler?

The same devices are also missing from the README in today’s 430.34 release :(

Unrelated, FYI: [url]https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/430.09/README/powermanagement.html[/url]

Now look what I found:
[url]Error | NVIDIA
So looks like Kepler mobile chips are already depreciated/obsoleted in some way so this wasn’t completely unintentionally. Since this still works on mine, this might be just affecting Windows for now since “game ready drivers” are mentioned. Looks like the same mess as with 3D-Vision. The usual internal communication failure, it seems.

Nvidia finally replied by email, also referring to that link.

I guess “Game Ready Driver” means “latest driver” (i.e. 430 series), for which it says that desktop Kepler is supported but mobile Kepler is not. Maybe the remaining 1292 devices still listed in the README are desktop devices? Is yours a desktop device?

They also gave me this link:
https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4788

The “Game Ready Driver” is the Windows graphics driver. Like said That 740A in the list is a specific desktop gpu derived from the mobile chip, I’m running a generic 740M mobile gpu. Also, another user already noticed his mobile Kepler gpu being removed from the list despite still working.
So we can safely assume that drivers >418 on Windows dropped some features like mobile Kepler support and 3D Vision while the Linux driver still supports this since this would require to create a new legacy driver which is always work for the nvidia devs to maintain it so the number of concurrent legacy drivers will be kept low.

As a conclusion and a happy owner of that said ‘unsupported’ mobile Kepler gpu which just got render offload I can only state that there are wise and not-so-wise questions you can pose to a company, sleeping dogs and such.

  • wise question: your docs tell that my device is still supported, yet it doesn’t work, why?
  • not-so-wise question: your docs tell that my device is unsupported, yet it works, why?
    for more info, take a look into the Adobe-Flash-Linux-legacy stuff, maybe you get the picture.

Ok, so I noticed that cuda 10.2 is actually unsupported on my Kepler mobile while graphics is still supported. So even on Linux, there’s an impact.

Any official news about these “lost” GPUs?
For me, it looks like these were omitted by some mistake.

By the way, version 450.51 of the drivers now includes supported-gpus.json file which lists the supported GPUs, the required driver versions (including the old ones, e.g. “71.86.xx” for RIVA TNT), etc. Here it is (I added line breaks for convenience): {"chips":[{"devid":"0x0020","name":"RIVA TNT","legacybranch":"71.86.xx","featu - Pastebin.com

These “forgotten” GPUs are not listed there at all. Strange.

I looked for GeForce GTX 765M (10DE:11E2), which one of our users has, in that file. It was missing there, although was listed as supported in the readme for 418.x.

The user checked that v440.x of the drivers seems to work OK with that GPU, but still, it would be good to know the official status.