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You used NVIDIA cards for twenty years and never run into an issue where the mainline driver stopped supporting your GPU and you had to manually download commun

• adrian_b 3y ago
  While I have retired the older cards, up to Kepler, I am still using a Maxwell GPU from 9 years ago and it is still well supported, like also my other Pascal, Volta and Turing GPUs, none of which is new. There might have been NVIDIA GPUs which have been supported for less than 10 years, but I never happened to have one of those. I have been using mostly Gentoo, and I never had to do anything besides "emerge nvidia-drivers", with the exception of the case that I have already mentioned with the laptop Optimus configuration, which required installing extra programs besides the official NVIDIA drivers. In all these twenty years I have used only Linux on all desktops and laptops, both at home and at work, and I have also written various OpenGL and CUDA programs, so I have used the NVIDIA cards in many different circumstances, without encountering problems. Some years ago, I was hoping that I would be able to get rid of the NVIDIA GPUs and use only AMD GPUs, which had a much better computational performance per dollar. Unfortunately, AMD has split their GPUs into RDNA GPUs that are good only for gaming and CDNA GPUs that are much too expensive for small companies or individuals, so they no longer make any GPU model that could be an upgrade for my old AMD GPUs, so the only choice remains to buy overpriced NVIDIA GPUs, unless the next Intel generation of GPUs will become more competitive for computational tasks. At least Intel makes a credible effort to compete with CUDA, with their oneAPI environment.