Plea to NVidia to add vulkan support to our graphics driver

Hi all,

I've created a post on the NVidia forum to request Vulkan support for our GPU drivers. Even for people who don't play games or anything this will become very useful in the future. OpenGL is slowly being deprecated (see my UE4 post as well) and to future-proof our favourite OS we really need Vulkan support.
I'd like to encourage you all to go over there, create an account (I know, just one more) and add something to the topic.
At the very least it might show someone that there are multiple people interested and even if there's no response from an official dev, I can refer to that post to indicate there actually is demand for it.

Thank you very much.

edit: thread was moved to the NVidia FreeBSD sub-forum, updated the link
 
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Is there a way to skip the real name and company registration step? I don't want to fill the form with garbage data.
 
nVidia doesn't care two bits about non-Windows and non HPC. There are probably more people that want to use nVidia cards in Macs and they aren't interested in fixing their driver to work with last years OS release. Not saying it's useless to complain, but don't get your hopes up. 😕
 
nVidia doesn't care two bits about non-Windows and non HPC. There are probably more people that want to use nVidia cards in Macs and they aren't interested in fixing their driver to work with last years OS release. Not saying it's useless to complain, but don't get your hopes up. 😕

Mac OS X is an entirely different matter since all drivers there must go through Apple, afaik. As for the hopes, we are mostly complaining on principle, the driver is advertised as supporting Vulkan and therefore it should provide an implementation. Other than that, I sorted out my Vulkan issues more than a year ago.
 
I commented on that post as well. I also added my plug for proper CUDA support as well, but that's really a different animal.
 
i do not think it is worth your time, nvidia have been total shit heads these years i imagine they will stop maintaining this driver in the next few years
 
The driver is 117.67 MB and in that size NVIDIA couldn't even fit in Vulkan support for my GeForce 4 ti. Madness!

This is obviously great news (since we don't have Nouveau to fall back on). Though honestly a little unexpected. It is also April 1st after all ;)
 
Well, NVIDIA did come through and we have - although not in a production driver yet - vulkan 1.2 support. I've been testing a bit and everything seems to be working well.
 
Ok, I know I'm resurrecting this post but I just noticed that on the (new?) driver download page for the RTX 30xx that there are only a few operating systems listed.
You know how on the old (?) driver page you had to click on the "Operating system" dropdown and then had to choose the last option "Show All Operating Systems" to see FreeBSD? I know most people probably don't end up there since they - rightfully so - install drivers via the port system but it's been like that for as long as I know.

Well, on the new driver download page there are only 6 now...I think it's safe to say that FreeBSD may have moved up in the NVIDIA world a bit:
Screenshot_20220407_134721.png


ps. also checked on a Windows install just in case there was some User Agent voodoo going on :)
 
I don't know if it has moved up but at least it hasn't moved down. Meanwhile, along with 32 bit platforms and older Windows releases, Solaris support seems to have been deprecated.
 
ps. also checked on a Windows install just in case there was some User Agent voodoo going on :)
I've checked on a Windows machine with both FireFox and Microsoft Edge and I get the same options as you showed in your screenshot.
I've also checked the non-GeForce specific download page and got the same results.

bsduck at least for Quadro they still support older versions of Windows and also Solaris. This is also true for recent Quadro card drivers.
 
That's why the list is so short nowadays. FreeBSD didn't move up, the list has been cut shorter.
It's more than that. Solaris has been booted out, so is MacOS. Also a few older Windows versions (even 64-bit) that are no longer widely used.
To me it's more or less saying that FreeBSD became a first-class citizen at NVIDIA. At least in my eyes this massively reduces the chance that FreeBSD support will be reduced in the near future, if anything it'll be maintained or expanded.
 
It's more than that. Solaris has been booted out, so is MacOS. Also a few older Windows versions (even 64-bit) that are no longer widely used.
To me it's more or less saying that FreeBSD became a first-class citizen at NVIDIA. At least in my eyes this massively reduces the chance that FreeBSD support will be reduced in the near future, if anything it'll be maintained or expanded.
MacOS was booted because of a fight between nvidia and Apple (both sides was wrong), ending apple giving the finger to nvidia AND his own customers with nvidia cards (ended up with Apple dropping support for not-too-old macbooks that had an nvidia card).
About support, Kepler was already cut off at 470 series, in a similar 390 series fashion. And this includes FreeBSD.
 
MacOS was booted because of a fight between nvidia and Apple (both sides was wrong)...
Oh I disagree:
Rather than wait for the next open-source library, Vulkan, to formalize, Apple developed its own graphics API, Metal, for use with iOS. Microsoft most certainly inspired Metal. Bringing Metal to macOS was all-but given and was ported to macOS in 2019, set to replace both OpenGL and OpenCL and skip Vulkan support.

macOS 10.14 Mojave required metal-compatible GPUs. At some point, during the macOS Mojave beta, Apple pulled Nvidia's ability to sign its code, which ended Nvidia's support for macOS in one spiteful, anti-competitive move. In order for GPUs to be Metal compatible, they needed drivers, and Nvidia wasn't able to release drivers.

Screw Crapple. I have already decided never to buy their products again, but if I hadn't this would be reason enough.
 
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