[stqism]

In fairness, the GT 730 will reach 10 years old in only 6 more months and loses performance wise to even older laptop iGPUs by a decent margin. The card alone is years past the age range GPUs “typically fail”, even Windows has long dropped support for it. Expecting even open source volunteers to maintain support for every old GPU while continuously improving the drivers and adding more functionality and fixes is a bit much.

[bayindirh]

Doesn't matter. Its performance was enough for what I needed from my computer until some of the applications started to break.

I have now replaced it with a Radeon RX550, which is 6.5 years old at this point, and works with open drivers like a charm, and amongst other things, I can integrate its power and utilization related data into my system dashboard very easily, because the drivers provide the relevant sensor access. Also, it works way smoother without finicky VSync and other small paper cuts.

Current, modern amdgpu driver supports cards which are 10 years old at this point. radeon kernel module supports cards even older than that, and this module is still updated, tuned up and fixed.

So, while AMD was the underdog, they managed to redesign their chips and restart a community and an independent department to develop and support open source drivers only.

I think NVIDIA can do that, too, if they can be bothered, but alas, they don't care.

[paulmd]

RX 550 windows support is being dropped by AMD as well. Linux community support will continue but at some point official support does end for these things.

https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-confirms-polaris-and-vega-ar...

Obviously having an open driver is nice (and nvidia is upstreaming one) but AMD still doesn’t support consumer cards in ROCm in Linux, AMD still doesn’t support hdmi 2.1 in Linux, and there’s probably (different) business concerns for nvidia as well. Not everything can be opened up - again, see hdmi 2.1, which will probably continue to require closed releases due to licensing requirements.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1417

[bayindirh]

RX550 and relevant cards' support was also dropped from AMDGPU-PRO drivers (closed source set of drivers from AMD), AFAIK, but it's not important.

As I said, open drivers supported by AMD are here [0] [1], and even the historic "radeon" driver which supports older cards than "amdgpu" is being supported and fixed up.

It's also important to understand that open source driver team was independent and separate from closed source driver (fglrx + windows) team in the beginning. This might still be the case.

NVIDIA is not upstreaming an open source driver. They are upstreaming a skeleton open source kernel module which bridges the closed source GLX libraries to a closed source blob which moved from the original kernel module to a flash storage + RISC-V core complex on the card itself. This is fundamentally different from what AMD is doing.

ROCm is historically slow to develop and being supported by (m)any cards in general, but considering a couple of high profile supercomputers are using their cards and they openly said that ROCm is a priority now, they started to get way faster in development part. Tons of ROCm libraries have landed to Debian in the last 6 months, and a couple of consumer cards started to be supported under Linux [2]. Depreciation of older cards in closed source drivers will also probably enable this support to be developed faster, because AFAICS, AMD has gone through more ISA changes than NVIDIA in the last decade.

From what I can find in FreeDesktop issue tracker, AMD is actively trying to bring HDMI 2.1 in Linux, in a completely open form, and they are very open about it [3]. Unfortunately free software and large profits are not very compatible in the content industry, but at least AMD is not silent, and trying their best in the open, unlike the other camp, which does sneaky things like artificially limiting the performance of alternative APIs, and flat out refusing the work with some versions of them while advertising support.

[0]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/agd5f/linux/-/tree/amd-stagin...

[1]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/agd5f/linux/-/tree/amd-stagin...

[2]: https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/radeon/en/latest/docs/com...

[3]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1417#note_21...

[paulmd]

I'm not sure what you're arguing here. There are important features missing in AMD's linux implementation, the ROCm ecosystem remains unsupported (on consumer hardware) under linux, and it relies on the same linux-firmware blobs as NVIDIA and everything else.

AMD is trying to get HDMI 2.1 support through legal, but they've been trying for years and the answer is generally "no". HDMI Forum doesn't want you to release open implementations, it is incompatible by design. This is a microcosm of the problems around licensing in the audiovisual space, the reason NVIDIA can't go open is also because of these intractible licensing problems. They just lean towards "release the functionality, but closed" instead of choosing "don't release the functionality".

[RaisingSpear]

I can run current Linux distros on 15 year old hardware without issue. If the vendor wants to drop support earlier, that's up to them, but it's a reason why people want open drivers.

Also, local stores around me still sell new GT 710s. Probably has something to do with Nvidia not making any low end GPUs since.

> Expecting even open source volunteers to maintain support for every old GPU

The great thing about open source is that anyone can fork the code and maintain support themselves. You don't get that option with proprietary drivers.