NVIDIA Drops Pascal Support On Linux, Causing Chaos On Arch Linux

NVIDIA has been "gradually dropping support for older videocards," notes Hackaday, "with the Pascal (GTX 10xx) GPUs most recently getting axed."

"What's more surprising is the terrible way that this is being handled by certain Linux distributions, with Arch Linux currently a prime example.?" On these systems, updating the OS with a Pascal, Maxwell or similarly unsupported GPU will result in the new driver failing to load and thus the user getting kicked back to the CLI to try and sort things back out there. This issue is summarized by [Brodie Robertson] in a recent video.
"Users with GTX 10xx series and older cards must switch to the legacy proprietary branch to maintain support," explains an announcement on the Arch Linux mailing list. But Hackaday points out that using the legacy option "breaks Steam as it relies on official NVIDIA dependencies, which requires an additional series of hacks to hopefully restore this functionality.

"Fortunately the Arch Wiki provides a starting point on what to do."

Re:

[karmawarrior]

I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to. The proprietary drivers are simply moving support from one version to another. It's stupid, but that's how it is.

Meanwhile in FOSS world, Nouveau supports Pascal (NV130) chipsets [freedesktop.org] though with some features not quite there yet (good enough for a daily driver for 90% of us, but if you want SLI or some similar features you'll have to wait)

Nvidia sucks, but they are getting better in terms of releasing documentation. This was a boneheaded way to deal with dropping

Re:

[thegarbz]

We so desperately need compulsory licensing, especially now since the newer cards are too expensive due to the "AI" ripoff

Pascal is a 10 year old graphics card. No we don't need compulsory licensing. What we need is a graceful way of handling something becoming unsupported. You said it yourself, new video cards are too expensive, why saddle them with more cost thanks to the requirement to support something that has outlived most cars.

Re:

[thegarbz]

And that will never work from an IP perspective alone. Especially since we're talking about open source.

Re:

[dgatwood]

Pascal is a 10 year old graphics card. No we don't need compulsory licensing. What we need is a graceful way of handling something becoming unsupported. You said it yourself, new video cards are too expensive, why saddle them with more cost thanks to the requirement to support something that has outlived most cars.

Why try to shove support for every graphics card into a single giant binary blob? Old cards aren't getting new features, so they shouldn't need support to keep working. If they do, the driver API or the user-space driver control API is designed wrong.

Re:

[thegarbz]

Better question. Why download a binary blob that isn't designed for your card? Old versions of drivers are available. Just use that.

To answer your question more directly: Because most cards share features and managing separate binaries for each card is a fucking nightmare which is why the companies moved away from it in the first place.

Still using my 1080Ti

[Valgrus Thunderaxe]

It's fine for everything if you're not interested in the latest games.

Re: Still using my 1080Ti

[liqu1d]

To be fair it still holds up in the latest games as long as you don't mind reducing all the bling/1080p. Genuinely legendary card given how long it's been relevant. Figures it would be software updates that killed it off rather than the hardware limits.

Re:

[godrik]

same here I still use old cards. They work fine for the little bit of rendering, gou computing, and ai inference I do.

Re:Still using my 1080Ti

[MrMacman2u]

You're completely correct, except it's still great for games too.

I'm still running plenty of my 1080p games on my GTX1070 no complaints at all, these are still strong and valid cards and I really don't have much incentive to upgrade.

As for the hilarious "what to do" instructions that are linked for Arch?

Step 1; don't use Arch. Step 2; Done.

I have no respect for a distro that doesn't respect my time and energy; one that reeks with the mentality that every day os tasks -should- have a high cognitive load and be hard to do "because they're supposed to be" when most every other distro has mitigated or eliminated those pinch points. Screw that. I have other things to do and worry about rather than babysitting some fussy OS that's so dev oriented that they've forgotten normal users exist... and wouldn't care even if they hadn't.

Re:

[caseih]

And doesn't the open source driver pretty much work even with opengl on those older cards? Is it really a big deal that the proprietary driver no longer works for these cards?

Re:

[MrMacman2u]

"Whoosh."

Oh, Pascal refers to a VIDEO CARD

[93 Escort Wagon]

I must admit, when I read the title my first thought was "why on earth would Arch Linux be using pascal rather than C or python?"

Re:

[karmawarrior]

Same. At some point in the past they dropped support for both Fahrenheit and Celsius, I wonder what kind of confusion that would generate!

Re:

[greytree]

For the same reason they would use Rust - fashion.

Re:

[multi io]

I thought they had switched to Turbo Pascal a long time ago /s

Re:

[martin-boundary]

It's because, in Pascal, strings carry their own length field, so you don't get buffer overflow attacks. It's even better than Rust. Duh!

Re:

[ZiggyZiggyZig]

Well I for one welcome our To-Pascal-Because-Security-Linux-Kernel-Rewriting-Team overlords!

Haven't bought Nvidia in years

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a a desktop whose Nvidia card lost Linux support many years ago.
They "generously" release drivers for Linux (and even FreeBSD), but only until they decide not to anymore.
It's just not worth it to buy from a company that treats its customers this way.
I've bought only non-hostile hardware since then.

Re:

[sound+vision]

The Linux drivers don't even have feature parity with their Windows drivers. Frame generation is missing entirely on the Linux side, and I don't think they support ray tracing either. I've also seen reports of stuttering issues on Linux, although I haven't noticed that personally.

It's enough to make someone want to buy an AMD GPU... too bad their chips are so poor at ray tracing. Other than that, I would have loved to go AMD.

Re:

[Deal In One]

Assuming what you said about the Linux drivers are true (dont know as I have not really tried gaming in Linux in years), you got an option of no ray tracing and poor ray tracing under linux.

Sounds like poor wins in this case (again, assuming your statement is true, having no direct experience with gaming in Linux in years).

Valve seem to agree

[DrYak]

you got an option of no ray tracing and poor ray tracing under linux [...] having no direct experience with gaming in Linux in years.

Valve who by now DO have quite some experience shipping Linux-based hardware, seem to agree with that. On Linux machines, AMD is the better option.

Re:

[sound+vision]

The difference is I'm willing to run two OSes, but I'm not willing to buy 2 video cards. The Linux experience can't be the sole consideration. Each time I install a game I make a decision, primarily based on graphics features, whether I'll run it in Linux or Windows.

All OSes

[darkain]

Nvidia uses a unified driver framework for Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD. Dropping all support for GTX 10 series and older was applied across the board in all their drivers, not just on Linux. This article is more about the mishandling of notification to end-users in the Arch ecosystem that did a normal "system update", which removed GPU support without warning for users of these GPUs. In the FreeBSD ecosystem, we use versioned drivers already, where the package name includes the driver version in it, and if

Re:

[robot5x]

this article is about a whining baby who desperately wants to get clicks on his youtube channel by sensationalising a gigantic nothing-burger.

Arch is a rolling release, news is posted on their site. This issue was known, there was a guideline posted on 20 Dec, I have absolutely no idea why Arch is being called out here. This guy needs to install ubuntu and STFU.

Re:All OSes

[thegarbz]

This guy needs to install ubuntu and STFU.

No no no no no. You need to frame it properly in a ragebait way for the Youtuuubers. Try this guy needs to install Ubuntu and then post a 20minute video entitled "Why I switched from Arch to Ubuntu, and why you should too!"

Re:

[king*jojo]

Try this guy needs to install Ubuntu and then post a 20minute video entitled "Why I switched from Arch to Ubuntu, and why you should too!"

I particularly love the people that have a "Arch is TRASH! Why you should install Ubuntu NOW!" video, then if you look at their feed, you notice a "Ubuntu is GARBAGE! You NEED to switch to Arch!" video.

Re:

[sabbede]

In my experience, Windows updates don't break old GPU drivers. I have some under management with GTX 7xx cards that have upgraded from Win10 all the way through 25H2.

The problem I did once run into was with having two cards of different generations (because I could keep one just for PhysX), when a driver update removed support for the older one. I think that was a 270 and a 780.

Re:

[Tablizer]

As Avis often said, "Number two tries harder".

Arch Linux

[bjoast]

What's more surprising is the terrible way that this is being handled by certain Linux distributions, with Arch Linux currently a prime example.

Arch isn't meant for people who just want something that works. You are expected to have the skills and willingness to adapt when packages change. I have been running it for 15 years, and during this time I have been forced to manually intervene multiple times in order to keep my system running. If you do not accept this philosophy, Arch is not the distro for you.

Steam OS is Arch

[_merlin]

If Arch isn't supposed to be a turnkey experience, why is it used as the basis for Steam OS? That's supposed to be aimed at people who want more of a console-like or appliance-like experience. That's exactly the kind of people who wouldn't want to be mucking around with this kind of nonsense.

Re: Steam OS is Arch

[robot5x]

It was originally based on Debian but Wikipedia says "This version transitioned to an Arch Linux base which used a rolling release model that Valve felt was better suited for hardware support." So that's a bit ironic (although I'm guessing they meant new hardware support, rather than 10yr old cards).

Blind Package Management

[bill_mcgonigle]

Most package management systems require us to figure out which card we have, figure out which package supports it, and install that.

Really we wanted "install the package that supports my card".

Apparently this current problem highlights this disconnect when a package no longer does what it used to but the package system blindly updates it anyway.

Being 2025, surely somebody in the past 30 years has floated a meta package management system to handle this mapping? Or an apt plugin? Anybody here know that hist

Re:

[robot5x]

well... I'm nitpicking, but the proposed solution (made over a week ago) does indeed "install the package that supports my card". The issue is this then breaks downstream compatibility with Steam. So Arch are caught a bit between a rock and hard place there.

Re:

[ganiman]

Ubuntu and the distros based on it have not required me to know what video card I have been using for a long time now. `ubuntu-drivers install` does this for Ubuntu and its variants (at least those which don't remove this command).

SteamOS is based on Arch, isn't it?

[mccalli]

I imagine the Steam situation will get sorted out pretty quickly then.

Re:

[Per Wigren]

No officially supported SteamOS systems have GTX 10xx series GPUs, though.

Is it?

[allo]

Or is it just moving the support from the driver to the legacy driver package? You probably just need to "upgrade" to the right package and arch didn't manage the transition from nvidia-current to nvidia-legacy to be unnoticed by the user.

Linus on Nvidia

[eneville]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=... [youtube.com]

Re:

[jmccue]

Cannot mod, but yes, this is why you should NEVER buy anything from Nvidia. I have been avoiding them for 20 years now.

If the video card does not work on OpenBSD, it is not worth buying for any OS.

Re:

[sabbede]

Well, I'd certainly agree that if a GPU doesn't work on the OS you use, it isn't worth buying. For you. If it works in the OS I use, it's totally worth me buying it. The only BSD in my house is a pfSense firewall, and you may be shocked to hear how little I care about what GPUs it supports.

I mean, you probably won't be shocked to hear that I care exactly 0%, but I don't know your mind. Maybe you would be completely blown away by this revelation. Maybe you're a madman and your BSD desktop is also you

Re:

[jmccue]

FWIW, my main system is Slackware. OpenBSD is used on an old "travel" laptop and I use OpenBSD to test programs I write on Linux.

I got caught by this same issue 15 to 20 years ago when Nvidia said they no longer support the card I had. That card did not work with Nouveau so I had by spend to buy another card. So, I use OpenBSD as a guide on what card I use with Linux so I would not get burned again.