Today I submitted Vulkan 1.2 conformance for NVK on all Kepler GPUs. (They're not conformant yet. There's a review period.)

Sometimes I wonder why I even bother putting time into old hardware.

Sure, there's a lot of GTX 1060s out there that are gonna become e-waste one day. But also, we can't reclock them with nouveau and likely will never be able to so they should probably just be e-waste. If you plug one in and want to run nouveau on it, it's just going to burn a lot of PCIe power plugs and render slower than the GPU you got for free with your old Intel CPU.

"Oh, but some of them can reclock!" Yes. Kepler, which is a 13-year-old architecture at this point. Sure, maybe with enough effort we can make it sing but it's so old and missing so many features that it can't run modern stuff anyway. So, yeah, maybe we can replicate a 2012 gaming experience in 2025. And the point is?...

A big part of it, though, is because I care about Linux users. There are a lot of people who still have one of those old cards and still want to use it. Maybe they can't afford a new GPU and the one they got second-hand from their rich uncle 5 years ago is the best they have. There's a lot of those people running Linux. There's a limit as to how much of my time I can really justify spending on ancient hardware but I want to give them what I can.

Another is that I really like the archeology of it. Today, I went on a deep dive down the rabbit hole of how NVIDIA has handled reading from global constant memory over the years. Tesla and Fermi didn't have any real magic here. Then Kepler B added a magic texture instruction that fetch from arbitrary 64-bit addresses. Then, on Maxwell, they unified a bunch of caches and added a non-coherent cache mode which skips all the coherency checks and just grabs the first thing that matches. On Volta, they reworked their coherency model but kept the non-coherent mode, only under a different name. I love learning about this stuff!

The third big reason is maintenance. Even if that old hardware will never run well, it does need to work. And the old nouveau stack is such a pain in the ass to work on and try to maintain. If we can make Zink+NVK even remotely decent on older hardware, that'll be a huge win for users in terms of reliability and stability and a huge win for the nouveau community in terms of support costs.

In the end, my job is to be a steward of the Linux graphics stack. To ensure that Linux graphics is good, actually. Sometimes that means deciding that my time is better spent on new features and hardware so that Linux can stay ahead of the curve. And sometimes that means I spend two weeks reviewing community patches and fixing the last few Kepler bugs so we can breathe some new life into some old GPUs.