[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

[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.